marythefan

In my first weeks as Executive Director of EFF, I’ve been reminded every day how consequential this moment is in determining what kind of future we will have.

We are on the edge. What each one of us steps up to do – with our expertise, energy, and resources – will determine whether our future is one of openness, security, and fundamental rights, or one controlled through fear, surveillance, and centralized power.

I am proud to take the torch and help lead our EFF community forward at this pivotal time in history. And we need you in the fight.

We can and must reject a false choice between innovation and civil liberties.

Right now, we are celebrating an important U.S. Supreme Court win in Chatrie v. United States that reaffirmed our right to privacy in our location data and will help curb one flank of supercharged government surveillance. But in another case, the Court overturned 90 years of precedent limiting executive power and rubber-stamped the President’s firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. The U.S. government also issued a chilling directive to Anthropic to prohibit the company from allowing foreign nationals to access its newest technology – then rescinded it two weeks later. And legislation limiting access to social media is advancing in many places around the world.

Each headline is different, but they tell one story: Many of the threats that once seemed hypothetical are now reality, and EFF’s work to ensure technology supports rights, justice, freedom, and innovation for all people has never been more critical. Governments and large corporations possess surveillance capabilities that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Ever greater concentrations of power are shaping speech, creativity, markets, and democratic institutions. Governments are increasingly seeking to control the internet and people’s ability to access information and communicate freely. Our community’s work is fundamental to the future of our countries, our livelihoods, and literally our lives.

I am also mindful that the United States marked its 250^th anniversary last week and that this week is EFF’s 36^th birthday. Anniversaries, like leadership changes, naturally invite reflection on where we are in history and challenge us to look ahead. What does it mean for a democracy, founded in an analog age, to survive in the digital world?

It is also an opportunity to ask how our EFF community can be even stronger, so we can help bring more people into the work of making sure technology serves everyone.

I began my career in public-interest work in Silicon Valley at the height of the 1990s dotcom boom, working at some of the earliest nonprofit “digital divide” programs that provided community access to computers and the internet, because I have always believed in the power of technology to create greater opportunity for all, not just profit for a few. I have dedicated my career to public interest technology because I am driven to see technology’s promise realized in my lifetime, and there is no other organization in the world that can do more to meet this moment and build a future where technology truly works for people than EFF.

These are perilous times. It is also a moment of extraordinary possibility. The future of AI has not been written and we can work together to get it right. We can make sure our laws reflect the needs of the modern digital age. We can build the technologies that empower rather than marginalize communities.

The future we want and need will be built by people and movements working together to ensure technology empowers rather than oppresses.

For me, the work starts with recognizing that digital rights are not a siloed policy issue. We must fight and win on the digital terrain to organize, speak freely, access healthcare, find work, receive an education, and participate fully in democracy. We can and must reject a false choice between innovation and civil liberties, and build power across movements to make sure technology truly works for people.

This challenge is what EFF was purpose-built to tackle. When EFF was founded in 1990, the World Wide Web did not yet exist, cell phones were the size of bricks, and EFF’s founders understood something remarkably prescient: Technology and civil liberties would become inseparable.

Now we all live digital lives, and the important digital rights issues that EFF has worked on since 1990 have become kitchen-table issues all around the world. EFF’s founders understood that how technology is built, developed, used, and controlled deeply intersects with rights, justice, freedom, and democracy.

EFF’s unique combination of world-class lawyers, activists, and public interest technologists pursue change simultaneously in the courts, legislatures, companies, and our communities, and pierce through false choices. This integrated, intersectional approach, grounded in deep legal, policy, and technical expertise, is a linchpin in fighting and winning against some of the most powerful forces in the world – both governments and trillion-dollar companies.

We defend people against unlawful government data collection and challenge license plate and face surveillance in our communities. We shape AI law and policy to protect civil liberties and support creativity and innovation. We push companies to strengthen encryption, fight to ensure you have the right to own what you buy, and build public interest technologies like Privacy Badger and Certbot that millions of people rely on every day.

This work matters because it all answers the same question: Will technology empower or control us?

As I look ahead, there are major battles on the horizon. We must:

• Challenge increasingly sophisticated government and corporate surveillance systems that endanger our rights, democracy, safety and security
• Preserve strong encryption and online anonymity
• Ensure AI is developed and used in ways that respect fundamental rights and works for those who build it, use it, and are affected by it
• Confront the concentrations of power that limit access to new creativity and defend the rights of developers to build and innovate

To meet these challenges, we must not only utilize the powerful levers of successful litigation, smart policy interventions, and effective public interest technology tools. We must also build a broader movement that recognizes that fights on the digital terrain are integral to all our fights for rights and justice – from civil rights and immigrants’ rights to reproductive rights, disability rights, LGBTQ+ rights, workers' rights, economic justice, and more. Together, our EFF community can help broaden the public conversation about technology's role in society and continue building the collective power necessary to shape the future rather than react to it.

I have hit the ground running, working with EFF’s exceptional staff and Board and starting to meet many of you in the broader EFF community. Every conversation has reinforced my confidence that our community is uniquely prepared for the work ahead. I’m looking forward to meeting more of you at my first EFFecting Change livestream on August 12 with Cory Doctorow, and hope this conversation is just the beginning of finding new ways to work together. Please stay tuned for additional in-person events with me around the country this fall.

As we celebrate EFF's birthday, I am energized by all the opportunities ahead for us to build on EFF’s strong foundation and make it even mightier. And we need you and others in the fight. Please renew your membership, become a recurring monthly supporter, and introduce someone new to EFF by snagging them a gift membership.

Everything we accomplish—every lawsuit, every policy victory, every public interest technology tool, every campaign—is possible because people like you are committed to ensuring technology strengthens freedom, privacy, creativity, and opportunity for everyone.

The future we want and need will be built by people and movements working together to ensure technology empowers rather than oppresses.

Let’s build that future together.

This post is part 2 in a series about automated content moderation. Read the first post here.

When whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a set of documents from Meta in 2020, among the revelations was a jarring statistic: The company’s algorithms designed to detect terrorist content incorrectly deleted nonviolent Arabic-language content 77 percent of the time, while failing to detect hate speech under the company’s own policies in many instances. Meta’s own transparency report released later that year demonstrated similar findings. Five years later, researchers in the region report that overzealous moderation remains a problem, while paths to remedy have all but collapsed.

Where these systems are faltering in Arabic, they’re positively failing in less-resourced languages. As a 2025 report from the Center for Democracy and Technology found, labeled datasets in certain languages and dialects such as Maghrebi Arabic and Kiswahili contain inconsistencies, bias, and inaccuracies due to the limited hiring of annotators who actually speak the languages as well as shifts in the languages themselves. An investigation into ChatGPT’s outputs in several low-resource languages demonstrates the depth of problem.

But language disparities are just one of several concerns as automated moderation becomes more widespread. From the systemic suppression of content from Palestine to the repeated misclassification of LGBTQ+ content as adult or explicit material, these varied examples demonstrate the risks of overreliance on automated moderation—and the need for stronger safeguards.

Transparency, Cultural Competence, Appeals

As we discussed in Part 1 of this series, automated systems can process content at a scale that humans never could, potentially enabling better moderation at scale and alleviating the psychological load on ill-paid moderators whose jobs require them to view incredibly disturbing content. But automated systems also reproduce existing biases, struggle to understand context, and often make mistakes that disproportionately affect journalists, activists, artists, and other vulnerable and marginalized communities.

As Rachel Griffin wrote in 2023, “Perfectly accurate moderation is not only technically out of reach but intrinsically impossible.” Despite those intrinsic flaws, there is a great deal companies, policymakers, and civil society can do to help ensure that highly-automated systems operate in ways that respect human rights, minimize predictable harms, and provide meaningful accountability when they fail. If companies are going to continue relying on automation to moderate users’ speech—and there is little reason to believe they won’t—then accountability must evolve alongside these technologies.

That evolution can start with committing to the Santa Clara Principles 2.0. These principles, first outlined in 2020 and re-launched in 2021 after substantial international input, reflect the needs and expectations of the global community and specifically address automation. The first Foundational Principle states:

Companies should ensure that human rights and due process considerations are integrated at all stages of the content moderation process, and should publish information outlining how this integration is made. Companies should only use automated processes to identify or remove content or suspend accounts, whether supplemented by human review or not, when there is sufficiently high confidence in the quality and accuracy of those processes. Companies should also provide users with clear and accessible methods of obtaining support in the event of content and account action. 

Drawing on the Santa Clara Principles 2.0, international human rights standards, and years of research documenting the shortcomings of automated moderation, we propose eight recommendations for policymakers thinking about regulation and companies deploying AI-assisted content moderation systems.

1. Automated technologies should help, not replace, human moderators. For example, automated systems can help flag and prioritize content for review, while humans can interpret context, handle sensitive cases, and refine system performance.
2. Companies must be transparent about when and how automation is used in content decisions.
3. Companies must regularly audit their automated systems for bias, with particular attention to low-resource languages, vulnerable and marginalized communities, and conflict zones.
4. Users must have the ability to appeal, and to provide context when they believe human or automated moderation decisions have wrongfully removed their content. Appeals should be promptly evaluated and decided by human moderators.
5. Companies should regularly assess the human rights impact of their moderation decisions, and issue public statements of the results
6. If they rely on third-party vendors, companies should carefully (and regularly) audit those vendors for compliance with these same principles
7. Lawmakers should avoid promoting and passing legislation that effectively or explicitly mandates automated moderation systems
8. Policymakers should also refrain from attempting to dictate platforms technical and design choices to favor or disfavor particular expression.

These recommendations understand that automated content moderation isn’t just a technical problem for clever engineers and product teams to solve. Because content moderation shapes public discourse and fundamental rights, its design and oversight must respond to the concerns of policymakers, civil society, independent researchers, and the communities most affected by these systems.

This is the second post in a 2-part series on automated content moderation. Read the first post here.