Professor Duan's new article Content Moderation on End-to-End Encrypted Systems: A Legal Analysis
The Article analyzes new E2EE content moderation technologies in light of major federal communication statutes. The article generally finds that content moderation technologies would pass muster under these statutes. However, advanced cryptographic techniques raise multiple unsettled questions of law under the communication privacy regimes. This legal uncertainty arises not because of the ambiguous ethical nature of the technologies, but because the decades-old statutes failed to accommodate, the innovations in cryptography that enable content. To the extent that platforms are limited in their ability to moderate end-to-end encrypted content, those limits may arise not from the technology but from the law.