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…
Facebook, in attempts to crack down on fake news and other content, has somehow made news organizations its enemy. Just one day after Facebook was criticized for rejecting a promoted post from the nonprofit investigative journalism outlet Reveal, Instagram has now reportedly removed a video from ProPublica’s account.
Switzerland has elected to allow online casinos, though a newly approved law intends to keep foreign operations from sharing in the take.
Apple has apparently relented and let encrypted text and voice service Telegram proceed with an update to make its app compliant with Europe’s new GDPR privacy protections, just days after CEO Pavel Durov alleged Apple was preventing Telegram from releasing updates worldwide at the behest of Russian censors.
A remote road in Pingtung County, Taiwan has suddenly become a highly-rated attraction on Google Maps for the thirstiest denizens of the internet thanks to a video uploaded by a tourist that shows her bare breast.
Papua New Guinea, a nation of over 8 million, has announced that it will shut down Facebook for a month. The PNG government says that the shutdown will give it time to assess the spread of objectionable content on the site like porn and fake news. The government also said that it’s exploring the creation of its own…
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which oversees telecommunications like radio, TV, and the internet in the U.S., doesn’t regulate content on online platforms like YouTube. But that hasn’t stopped people from sending complaints about the video site to the federal agency—and they’re every bit as unhinged as…
Apple has begun removing applications that use the CallKit framework from the Chinese version of its App Store after the nation’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology moved to more strictly enforce recent cybersecurity regulations, per a report in 9to5Mac.
Top brass from Facebook, Twitter, and Google stopped by Stanford Law School Thursday to participate in a conversation about the challenges social media companies face in regulating free speech and protecting democracies. The panel showed the companies are much better at identifying problems than actually solving them.
Few people would think of the British cartoon character Peppa Pig as a subversive icon. But don’t tell that to the Chinese government. China has started to ban Peppa Pig from social media for being too “gangster,” deleting over 30,000 videos of the cartoon pig on one platform alone.
Tanzania issued a warning over the weekend that all online media creators, including everything from online radio providers to bloggers, have just two weeks to register with the government. Registration and license fees add up to about $920, roughly what the average Tanzanian earns in an entire year.
A recent change to Google’s App Engine will discontinue a practice called domain-fronting, an essential technique used by dozens of internet freedom tools designed to allow users to work around state-level internet censorship.
Sina Weibo, one of China’s most popular social media sites, has reversed a ban on content “related to” homosexuality.
The hashtag #IAmGay trended on Chinese social network Sina Weibo after censors launched a crackdown on “illegal” content including media supposedly “related to” homosexuality, Sky News reported on Saturday.
The Chinese government has banned all online sales of the Christian Bible, the New York Times reported Thursday.
Iranians have been banned from downloading apps from the App Store, Gizmodo has confirmed.
