Protect & Promote Digital Rights

Internet access is essential to retrieve and share information, find work and resources, and engage in political, civic, and social discourse. All too often, however, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) act as self-interested gatekeepers rather than neutral conduits, to the detriment of the public interest.

In the digital age, all people should feel safe and empowered to create, learn and connect. While more than a billion people rely on social media websites and apps to communicate and connect with friends, family and their communities, all too often people find themselves marginalized by discriminatory company policies or targeted by hate speech and harassment from other users. We work to ensure that the civil rights and civil liberties of all people are respected online. Recent work has included representing a local Black journalist and an independent band whose posts were erroneously removed from an online platform, and submitting an advocacy letter to PayPal and Venmo demanding a stop to practices that harm marginalized communities by shutting users out without due process.

As gatekeepers of expression of billions of people worldwide, social media sites and other online platforms have a responsibility to be transparent about how, when, and why they moderate user content. We work as part of a diverse coalition of digital rights, civil rights, and human rights orgs to hold tech companies accountable to public transparency regarding how they enforce their own policies and practices and helped develop and are original signatories to the Santa Clara Principles.

One of the most important free speech, equity, and innovation issues of the digital age, net neutrality protects Californians by ensuring they can fully participate economically, socially, and politically in everyday life. We fight to uphold state and local net neutrality laws and push ISPs and the government agencies they contract with to respect net neutrality laws and principles, particularly for vulnerable communities.

Social media sites and other online platforms facilitate an unprecedented sharing of information, ideas, and viewpoints worldwide, serving as the primary source of news and social connection for billions of people. All too often, however, social media companies function as gatekeepers of users’ speech and expression, raising concerns about their unchecked power and ability to remove people and content from platforms that have become indispensable. We work to hold both government actors and platforms accountable for their censorship of people’s speech online, including the disproportionate censorship of content created by Black activists and journalists and LGBTQ people.

We defend and promote free expression in the technology age. The internet and other electronic mediums function as a modern public square, and the movement of speech online should not diminish foundational rights to freedom of speech, expression, association, and inquiry.

We regularly work to support the right of people to engage in important critique and speak anonymously on the internet. Our work has included Hey v. Twitter (amicus brief in support of anonymous online speech), In Re Ex Parte Application of Dr. Fredric Eshelman (anonymous online speech), In re DMCA § 512(h) Subpoena to Twitter, Inc. (anonymous online speech), X Corp. (data-driven criticism of corporation) v. CCDH, Taylor Swift Attempts to Silence Critic, ACLU Fires Back, and Twitter Subpoenas Chill Free Speech.

We make sure people have access to online information, including work to stop improper internet filtering in schools and libraries.

We work to ensure that intellectual property protections are not improperly used to undermine privacy, free expression and inquiry, access to information, and other fundamental rights. Our work has included defending a parody that was supporting LGBTQ rights, challenging patents on breast cancer genes that restricted access to genetic testing, medical care, and cancer research, and supporting security researchers identifying privacy and security threats with RFID technology.

We work to protect free speech online from unconstitutional state laws, while ensuring that privacy can be protected. We filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit explaining the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act’s constitutional defects, but urged the court to rule narrowly and recognize that a different consumer privacy law could pass constitutional muster. The brief canvases the many harms that can flow from private actors’ collection, aggregation, use, and sharing of people’s sensitive information, and the vital role consumer privacy laws could play in preventing or remediating those harms. It then discusses avenues that legislators can take to protect consumer privacy without infringing free speech. The Ninth Circuit quoted the ACLU brief in its decision.

We work extensively on matters pertaining to CDA 230, including amicus briefs in the following cases: Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roomate.com, Hassel v. Bird, Twitter v. Taamneh, Gonzalez v. Google, In re Casino Style Games and Zuckerman v. Meta.