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Facebook Responds to Global Coalition’s Demand That Users Get a Say in Content Removal Decisions EFF and more than 100 civil society organizations across the globe wrote directly to Mark Zuckerberg recently demanding greater transparency and accountability for Facebook content moderation practices. A key step, we told Facebook, is implementation of a robust appeals proces s giving all users the power to challenge and reverse the platform’s content removal decisions. Facebook responded earlier this month in a private letter to EFF that we made public this week. In it we see a win for users fighting to get their content back up. Facebook has extended the appeals option to cover almost all categories of speech alleged to be in violation of platform rules, including content deemed to be spam, dangerous, or terrorist propaganda. People who report content that violates Facebook’s community standards but remains on the platform will also get to challenge Facebook’s inaction (although i...

With EFF’s Help, Language Teacher Responds to Ridiculous Patent Threat Foreign languages have been taught, and studied, for thousands of years. People who teach languages are the last folks that should be dealing with patent threat letters—but incredibly, that’s exactly what has happened to Mihalis Eleftheriou. Hodder and Stoughton , a large British publisher, has sent a letter to Eleftheriou claiming that it has rights to a patent that covers recorded language lessons, and demanding that he stop providing online courses.  Eleftheriou teaches a variety of online classes through his Language Transfer project. The courses are simple audio files uploaded to platforms like Soundcloud and YouTube . So you can imagine his surprise when he received a letter [ PDF ] from Hodder and Stoughton, saying that his project infringes a U.S. patent. Hodder and Stoughton contends that Language Transfer infringes U.S. Patent No. 6,565,358 , titled “Language teaching system.” The pat...