In the winter of 2010, a 19-year-old Moroccan man named Kacem Ghazzali logged into his email to find a message from Facebook informing him that a group he had created just a few days prior had been removed from the platform without explanation. The group, entitled “Jeunes pour la séparation entre Religion et Enseignement” (or “Youth for the separation of religion and education”), was an attempt by Ghazzali to organize with other secularist youth in the pious North African kingdom, but it was quickly thwarted. When Ghazzali wrote to Facebook to complain about the censorship, he found his personal profile taken down as well.

Back then, there was no appeals system, but after I wrote about the story, Ghazzali was able to get his accounts back. Others haven’t been so lucky. In the years since, I’ve heard from hundreds of activists, artists, and average folks who found their social media posts or accounts deleted—sometimes for violating some arcane proprietary rule, sometimes at the order of a government or court, other times for no discernible reason at all.

The architects of Silicon Valley’s big social media platforms never imagined they’d someday be the global speech police. And yet, as their market share and global user bases have increased over the years, that’s exactly what they’ve become. Today, the number of people who tweet is nearly the population of the United States. About a quarter of the internet’s total users watch YouTube videos, and nearly one-third of the entire world uses Facebook. Regardless of the intent of their founders, none of these platforms were ever merely a means of connecting people; from their early days, they fulfilled greater needs. They are the newspaper, the marketplace, the television. They are the billboard, the community newsletter, and the town square.

And yet, they are corporations, with their own speech rights and ability to set the rules as they like—rules that more often than not reflect the beliefs, however misguided, of their founders.

Source: How American Corporations Are Policing Online Speech Worldwide

T-Mobile screwed over millions of customers when it collected their geolocation data and sold it to third parties without their consent. Now, two of these customers are trying to pursue a class-action lawsuit against the company for the shady practice, but the telecom giant is using another shady practice to force them to settle their dispute behind closed doors.

On Monday, T-Mobile filed a motion to compel the plaintiffs into arbitration, which would keep the complaint out of a public courtroom. See, when you sign a contract or agree to a company’s terms of service with a forced arbitration clause, you are waiving your right to a trial by jury and oftentimes to pursue a class-action lawsuit at all. Settling a dispute in arbitration means having it heard by a third party behind closed doors. And an arbitration clause is buried in T-Mobile’s fine print.

T-Mobile’s terms of service state that customers do have the option to opt out of arbitration, which is buried within the agreement and states that they “must either complete the opt out form on this website or call toll-free 1-866-323-4405 and provide the information requested.” They also only have 30 days to do so after they have activated their service. After that brief time period, users are no longer eligible to opt out.

The plaintiffs, Shawnay Ray and Kantice Joyner of Maryland, filed the class-action complaint against T-Mobile in May. Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T were all also hit with lawsuits that same month for selling customer location data. “The telecommunications carriers are the beginning of a dizzying chain of data selling, where data goes from company to company, and ultimately ends up in the hands of literally anybody who is looking,” the complaint against T-Mobile states. The comment is largely referring to a Vice investigation that found that the phone carriers sold real-time location data to middlemen and that this data sometimes eventually ended up with bounty hunters.

Source: T-Mobile Says Customers Can’t Sue Because It Violates Its ToS