The Chinese government, no stranger to mass censorship, has halted a stopgap approval process it has been using to vet video games before they can be released to the public amid a broader crackdown on the market, Bloomberg reported this week.
Lu Wei, the former chief of the imposing Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and one of the primary architects of the mass censorship foisted on China’s estimated 700 million internet users, pleaded guilty this week in Chinese court to taking some 32 million yuan (about $4.6 million) in bribes, the Associated…
The Alphabet incubator tasked with tackling “some of the toughest global security challenges,” from online extremism and cybersecurity to government censorship, has rolled out new tool aimed at defending against attacks on free speech around the globe.
On Thursday, police in Vietnam reported that a court had jailed a 40-year-old man for two and a half years due to the comments included in his Facebook posts. This is the second Facebook-related imprisonment in the country in the past week.
Today, representatives from tech companies including Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Facebook, Twitter, and Google will testify before the Senate Commerce Committee on issues of consumer data privacy at a hearing with the limply stated purpose of finding “what Congress can do to promote clear privacy expectations without hurting…
Google’s widely reported search engine prototype for China, which is allegedly code-named Dragonfly, not only blacklists search terms to comply with the wishes of government censors but ties all searches to devices’ phone numbers, according to a report on Friday from the Intercept.
Google took down a series of YouTube ads for Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny before a vote for regional governors on Sunday and amid protests over President Vladimir Putin’s plans to raise the retirement age for state pensions, the Guardian reported.
Armed with various analyses of how users of the platform interact with and receive information from U.S. politicians and news outlets online, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey plans to firmly refute accusations that the social network is inherently biased against conservatives or doing anything to silence their tweets.
Last year, a Google engineer named James Damore triggered an entirely unnecessary and ultimately unproductive controversy after his internally published 10-page memo decrying “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” became a matter of public record. Damore, who more or less used the pretense of science to imply some of his…
President Trump is awake, angry, and tweeting this morning, which wouldn’t normally be newsworthy. But Trump just weighed in on a case that strikes close to his legitimacy as president: The Reality Winner leak. And he seems to think that it wasn’t a big deal.
Apple has reportedly pulled thousands of apps from its App Store in China, possibly in response to pressure from government-run media outlets in recent weeks.
Following similar action against secretive AI drone imaging program for the U.S. military, Project Maven, Googlers are once again organizing internally to push back against their leadership—this time around a project dubbed Dragonfly, the proposed search product the company intends to build for the Chinese market in…
Facebook has “unpublished” four pages belonging to InfoWars in a move that could financially devastate the conspiracy theory empire. Facebook is avoiding the word “ban,” since InfoWars can appeal the decision, unlike Apple’s recent move to ban InfoWars podcasts, something that’s understood to be permanent.
Facebook on Tuesday announced its banning of eight pages, 17 profiles, and seven Instagram accounts that engaged in what it described as online political activity that was both “inauthentic” and ultimately an “abuse” of its platform. While the activity was not attributed to anybody specific, the implication was clear,…
China has an army of internet censors who comb through the web and block information that the government doesn’t want its people to see. But the job of the censors is about to get easer if Google has its way. The tech giant is planning to release a new censored version of its search engine and apps in the land of 1.3…
Authorities in Iran arrested four girls and women last week for posting videos of themselves dancing on Instagram. Only one of the girls, 17-year-old gymnast Maedeh Hojabri, has been identified. State TV in Iran aired her “confession” on Friday.
The passage of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA)—two well-intentioned but ultimately deeply-flawed laws—have been devastating for sex workers in the United States by pushing them off the internet. Despite the heaps of criticism, the laws have attracted,…
The Vindicator, a news outlet in Liberty, Texas, wanted to help its followers read the entire U.S. Declaration of Independence before the Fourth of July, so it posted excerpts on its Facebook page. But something in one of the most significant documents in modern history triggered Facebook’s filters.
The Ugandan government has implemented a law forcing mobile users to pay taxes to use mobile money and social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Skype.
Right-wingers have long been obsessed with the notion Silicon Valley liberals are conspiring to censor them on social media. But it’s reached a fever pitch recently, with Republicans decrying Google’s fact-checking modules and its firing of workplace sexist James Damore, pretty much anything Facebook does to slow down…
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