I appreciate that the EFF is being very principled here, but it also seems a little naive. Basically I think there are two threats that users face, and efforts

I appreciate that the EFF is being very principled here, but it also seems a little naive. Basically I think there are two threats that users face, and efforts to defend against them are in tension with each other. The first threat is that the government might effectively take control of censoring all speech on the internet (in the name of national security, or preventing dangerous health/election misinformation, etc.) which risks politically-biased enforcement or removing one of the layers of separation between users and government snoops. In contrast to this, the EFF seems to imagine that privately-run moderation of social media is a panacea that will allow users to completely escape partisan bias and snooping. That would possibly be the case if users had free choice of which company they trusted their accounts with, but in practice if you want to reach your friends on Facebook/Twitter you need an account on Facebook/Twitter, and you are subject to their censorship and data harvesting policies. Fortunately the EFF does acknowledge the dangers that come from a lack of interoperability[0], but by "protecting" users from government efforts to (ostensibly) prevent viewpoint discrimination, the EFF is effectively doing the work of the social media companies who are, as a cartel, perpetrating many of the abuses that the EFF claims to be against. This is the second threat, which EFF seem to be exasperating. So it becomes a question of strategy. Should the EFF grudgingly accept more government oversight, despite the dangers, to mitigate the already existing stifling of free speech that these large companies cause? (Here I mean the ethical principle of freedom of speech, not the narrow legal right to the same.) Or should they commit fully to stopping any government oversight, while hoping that the current situation suddenly gets better when the government finally demands interoperability instead? I personally think a little pragmatism is required here. The EFF should be realistic about the idea that the "free market" cares about free speech, and the even less credible idea that the government will fix this market failure. Instead they should accept that there is a narrow role for governments to play in protecting users of "common carrier" social networks (while they continue to campaign for genuine interoperability). In particular, the government should be welcomed to legislate that companies that control the online speech of more than some large threshold of the country should be forced to allow their users to opt out of any types of censorship (of legal speech) that those companies implement. So, for example, if Facebook want their default moderation policy to include a ban on vaccine hesitancy and racial slurs, then they should be able to set that, but users should be able to opt out of those filters. (Probably the EFF should compromise and allow companies to unilaterally ban adult and graphically violent content, as those are categories of speech that don't deserve the same levels of protection). [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/legislative-path-interoperable-internet https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/legislative-path-inter...