Two Australian travel bloggers have been arrested in Iran for flying a hobby drone without a permit. The bloggers often take photos with their drone and publish them to social media, but they disappeared from the internet in June after posting from Pakistan. Read More >>
Today, YouTube clarified how it plans to handle videos that don’t violate any of its policies but still contain offensive religious and supremacist content: hide them and make sure they can’t make any money. Read More >>
Germany’s parliament just passed a law that forces social media sites to quickly take down illegal and slanderous content or face a fine of €50 million (£43.8 million). The new rule affects Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites with more than 2 million users. Read More >>
On Wednesday, ProPublica published dozens of startling training documents reportedly used by Facebook to train moderators on hate speech. As the trove of slides and quizzes reveals, Facebook uses a warped, one-sided reasoning to balance policing hate speech against users’ freedom of expression on the platform. This is perhaps best summarised by the above image from one of its training slideshows, wherein Facebook instructs moderators to protect “White Men,” but not “Female Drivers” or “Black Children.” Read More >>
There's always a fine line to tread between freedom of speech and blocking content designed to incite hatred and violence against a specific group or groups of people. The EU is about to enshrine a line of some kind in law though, as it finalises plans to require internet companies to block extreme content. Read More >>
Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to create an algorithm to filter out abusive and hateful language during a company-sponsored Q&A with President Obama in 2015 according to a Buzzfeed report. Read More >>
A small business in Minnesota is suing over the US Olympic Committee’s ban on tweeting about the Olympic games. The Committee announced last month that non-sponsors are banned from even using hashtags like #Rio2016 or #TeamUSA. Zerorez, a carpet cleaning business in Minnesota, will file suit in District Court on Thursday. Read More >>
Internet trolls; whether on message boards, social media sites or even in online games, we've all faced them. But are the owners of web services really doing enough to stamp them out? After receiving a barrage of racist abuse and even death threats, ex-footballer Stan Collymore has called out Twitter as preferring to protect its bank balance rather than its users. Read More >>
Anti-Gay group Straight Pride UK is abusing the DMCA takedown process to censor work by a journalist. No surprise there — the DMCA is twisted for all kinds of dumb purposes. The inexplicable part? The hate group filed a takedown on... its own press release. How dare you say that we said the words that we wrote in a press release. Read More >>
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