Instagram will begin removing photos of people displaying the ‘OK’ hand sign and possibly banning users who do so under the company’s new hate speech rules.“We remove photos of hate speech or symbols, like swastikas or white power hand signs,” states the company’s ‘report’ function.
Category: Technology
Apple caves to China, deletes police-tracking app used in Hong Kong protests
Charles Mok, an IT legislator in Hong Kong, tweeted his letter to Cook about his disappointment in Apple Hong Kong for banning HKmap.live from the App Store. At the of the letter, he said: “We Hongkongers will definitely look closely at whether Apple chooses to uphold its commitment to free and other basic human rights, or become an accomplice for Chinese censorship and oppression.”
In leaked audio, Mark Zuckerberg rallies Facebook employees against critics, competitors and the US government
July should have been a relief for Facebook. It wasn’t.
The 100 million dollar lawsuit that should void Big Tech’s CDA immunity
The story Fyk is telling, in this case, goes beyond the question of whether Facebook is a publisher or a platform, which has been the subject of a lot of talk lately. The argument Fyk is making is that Facebook acted as a “Developer of information,” thus making Facebook an “internet content provider” by legal definition under Section 230(f)(3), and that Facebook is pretty much competing with its own users and there is zero legal immunity for that.
The argument of publisher vs platform is a publisher can be held liable for things published on their site, while a platform gets immunity.
Colorado becomes first state to ban bar codes for counting votes over security concerns
Citing security concerns, Colorado has become the first state to stop counting ballots with printed barcodes.
The state’s secretary of state told CNN she felt it was a necessary step to ensure Colorado maintains its position as a national leader on election security.
Dr. Robert Epstein: How Big Tech’s algorithms can impact opinions and votes in the 2020 election
Just what are some of the methods that tech giants like Google and Facebook can use to shift their users’ attitudes, beliefs, and even votes?
How do search engine rankings impact undecided voters?
How powerful of an impact can search engine algorithms have on our perceptions and actions, without us even knowing?
Texas AG leads Google antitrust probe
Fifty attorneys general are joining an investigation into Google over possible antitrust violations, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the initiative’s leader, announced Monday.
The news confirms reports last week about the bipartisan investigation into Google’s practices. The probe includes attorneys general from 48 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. California and Alabama are not involved in the probe, Paxton said at a press conference.
America’s-own ‘Ministry of Truth’ unleashes the military to fight ‘disinformation’
The Pentagon has unveiled an initiative to fight “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks” by unearthing deep-fakes and other polarizing content with the eventual goal of rooting out so-called “malicious intent” entirely. You had better get your thinking in line with the Pentagon and DARPA, or things could get ugly quickly.
In 2018 election, Google’s bias may have shifted 78.2 million votes to one political party
Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015. This is because many races are very close and because Google’s persuasive technologies are very powerful.
In the weeks leading up to the 2018 election, bias in Google’s search results may have shifted upwards of 78.2 million votes to the candidates of one political party (spread across hundreds of local and regional races). This number is based on data captured by my 2018 monitoring system, which preserved more than 47,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, along with the nearly 400,000 web pages to which the search results linked. Strong political bias toward one party was evident, once again, in Google searches.
Silicon Valley’s Communist social credit system
Many Westerners are disturbed by what they read about China’s social credit system. But such systems, it turns out, are not unique to China. A parallel system is developing in the United States, in part as the result of Silicon Valley and technology-industry user policies, and in part by surveillance of social media activity by private companies.
Here are some of the elements of America’s growing social credit system.
