CDT protects people's right to speak, access information, and organize online, pushing platforms toward content moderation practices that are transparent, consistent, and supportive of free expression and policymakers toward incentivizing a more diverse marketplace of ideas.
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The internet and new technologies give individuals the ability to publish and receive information, participate in political processes, and create and share knowledge. CDT has fought to extend the highest level of free speech protections to the internet and to keep new technologies free of government censorship and content gatekeepers. Private online service providers must also be guided by international human rights principles as they design and implement their content policies.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
CDT and Partners Urge New York Governor to Veto the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act
The bill would require an automated tool accessing publicly available news websites to disclose data indicating its nature, purpose, parent company, and user it serves, and, unrealistically, every possible future use of the information it collects.
Congress Should Protect Children Online Without Sacrificing Privacy and Free Expression
CDT is urging lawmakers to pursue protections that address the underlying incentives and data practices that place young people at risk—without imposing broad censorship mandates or forcing people to surrender their privacy to access online services.
The FTC’s proposed framework wrongly treats standard technical steps that are needed to train AI models, and ensure they are accurate, reliable, fair, and safe, as potential “deceptive steering” away from an assumed “neutral” baseline.
