An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Chinese journalists and netizens recently found that Apple Music's Chinese streaming service censored a song by Hong Kong singer Jacky Cheung that references the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, an extremely politically sensitive topic for the Chinese Communist Party. The incident's 30th anniversary is coming up in June. Sophie Richardson, the China Director at Human Rights Watch, called the reported move "spectacularly craven." The Tiananmen protests are emblematic of a larger pro-democracy movement in China that was snuffed out by the Beijing government. Thousands of protesters were killed, but the exact numbers have themselves been censored by Chinese government officials.

Apple Music has also reportedly censored Anthony Wong and Denise Ho, two pro-democracy singers. After being noticed by Chinese netizens, the removals were reported by the Hong Kong Free Press and The Stand, two Hong Kong-based news outlets. Taiwan News also reported the censorship of Cheung's "Ren Jian Dao." The music remains available on Apple Music's North American products. "By removing a song referring the Tiananmen Massacre, @apple is actively participating in the Chinese Communist Party's agenda of scrubbing the colossal violations it has committed against the Chinese people from collective memory and rewriting history," tweeted Yaqiu Wang, a Chinese researcher with Human Rights Watch.

Tuesday's hearing was meant to examine the rise of white nationalism and white supremacy and the role social media plays in its spread. Then the comments got hijacked. From a report: YouTube moderators disabled comments on livestreams of the House Judiciary Committee's hearing about hate crimes the rise of white nationalism on Tuesday, deeming them too hateful for the platform. The comment sections quickly flooded with hate speech and white nationalist memes before the hearing had even started. The comments included derogatory remarks about women on camera, anti-Semitic slurs, far-right memes with references to "white genocide," and pro-Trump slogans. The channels' comments sections were deactivated within an hour. [...] YouTube's disabling of comments is ironic: House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York, made special reference in his opening statement of the role social media platforms play in spreading hate speech and extremism in his opening statement.

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: As YouTube battles misinformation catastrophes and discovers new ways people are abusing its system, the company is shifting toward more commercial, advertiser-friendly content at a speed its creator community hasn't seen before. The golden age of YouTube -- the YouTube of a million different creators all making enough money to support themselves by creating videos about doing what they love -- is over... By the end of 2016, when algorithm changes were creating headaches for some of the platform's biggest creators, people started announcing they had to take a break from the site they called home. YouTube wasn't what it was between 2011 and 2016... YouTube was exerting more control over what users saw and what videos would make money...

YouTube faced an escalating crisis of radicalization and sweeping conspiracy theories that had been ignored by executives for years. The company's first small efforts to address these serious issues -- promoting content from musicians, late-night shows, and recommending fewer independent creators -- would have huge secondary effects on the middle-tier creators who had once been the heart of the platform during its golden period. It pushed YouTube toward the exact same Hollywood content to which it had once been an alternative.... Even people outside of YouTube saw what was happening. "YouTube is inevitably heading towards being like television, but they never told their creators this," Jamie Cohen, a professor of new media at Molloy College, told USA Today in 2018....

Individual YouTube creators couldn't keep up with the pace YouTube's algorithm set. But traditional, mainstream outlets could: late-night shows began to dominate YouTube, along with music videos from major labels. The platform now looked the way it had when it started, but with the stamp of Hollywood approval.
It's a contrast from the earliest days of YouTube, the article argues. Rather than user-generated content, "it was something else that helped the site explode in popularity: piracy." But their pivot to user-generated content apparently slowed with what YouTube creators call the "adpocalypse" -- YouTube's aggressive demonetization of "problematic" videos. (A handful of creators had been making more than a million dollars a month, and some even quit their jobs to focus on making videos full-time.)

To be fair, by 2017 YouTube had a problem. Every minute users uploaded 27,000 minutes of new footage, making it difficult to pre-screen. But after adjusting their algorithm, "perceived, secretive changes instilled creators with a distrust of the platform."

The old YouTube "seemed to welcome the wonderfully weird, innovative, and earnest, instead of turning them away in favor of late-night show clips and music videos," writes the Verge. But the new YouTube is different, say two brothers who used CGI to re-create Mortal Kombat's most gruesome kills on their RackaRacka channel. They say the new YouTube now buries their videos for "excessive violence."

Facebook, Google and Twitter are headed back to Washington next week to testify at a congressional hearing about alleged tech censorship. From a report: Tech companies have faced accusations that they're censoring conservative speech on their platforms. The companies have denied the allegations in the past. The hearing before the Senate Judiciary's subcommittee on the Constitution is scheduled for April 10 and is titled "Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse." A Facebook spokesperson said Neil Potts, its public policy director, will be testifying. Twitter and Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. A source familiar with the Senate hearing said Twitter and Google officials will also be attending. The hearing will likely mark Potts' second congressional appearance next week. Facebook and Google officials are expected to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on April 9 to answer questions about the spread of white nationalism on their platforms.

"Mark Zuckerberg says regulators and governments should play a more active role in controlling internet content," according to the BBC, calling for new laws governing harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Facebook's chief says the responsibility for monitoring harmful content is too great for firms alone... "Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree," Mr Zuckerberg writes... In brief, Mr Zuckerberg calls for the following things:

- Common rules that all social media sites need to adhere to, enforced by third-party bodies, to control the spread of harmful content

- All major tech companies to release a transparency report every three months, to put it on a par with financial reporting

- Stronger laws around the world to protect the integrity of elections, with common standards for all websites to identify political actors

- Laws that not only apply to candidates and elections, but also other "divisive political issues", and for laws to apply outside of official campaign periods

- New industry-wide standards to control how political campaigns use data to target voters online

- More countries to adopt privacy laws like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force last year

- A "common global framework" that means these laws are all standardised globally, rather than being substantially different from country to country

- Clear rules about who's responsible for protecting people's data when they move it from one service to another
Zuckerberg believes the same regulations should apply to all web sites to make it easier to stop the spread of "harmful content." He also says Facebook will be creating "an independent body so people can appeal our decisions" when content is taken.

Russian authorities have ordered ten major VPN providers to begin blocking sites on the country's blacklist. "NordVPN, ExpressVPN, IPVanish and HideMyAss are among those affected," reports TorrentFreak. "TorGuard also received a notification and has pulled its services out of Russia with immediate effect." From the report: During the past few days, telecoms watch Roscomnadzor says it sent compliance notifications to 10 major VPN services with servers inside Russia -- NordVPN, ExpressVPN, TorGuard, IPVanish, VPN Unlimited, VyprVPN, Kaspersky Secure Connection, HideMyAss!, Hola VPN, and OpenVPN. The government agency is demanding that the affected services begin interfacing with the FGIS database, blocking the sites listed within. Several other local companies -- search giant Yandex, Sputnik, Mail.ru, and Rambler -- are already connected to the database and filtering as required.

"In accordance with paragraph 5 of Article 15.8 of the Federal Law No. 149-FZ of 27.07.2006 'On Information, Information Technology and on Protection of Information' hereby we are informing you about the necessity to get connected to the Federal state informational system of the blocked information sources and networks [FGIS] within thirty working days from the receipt [of this notice]," the notice reads. A notice received by TorGuard reveals that the provider was indeed given just under a month to comply. The notice also details the consequences for not doing so, i.e being placed on the blacklist with the rest of the banned sites so it cannot operate in Russia. The demand from Roscomnadzor sent to TorGuard and the other companies also requires that they hand over information to the authorities, including details of their operators and places of business. The notice itself states that for foreign entities, Russian authorities require the full entity name, country of residence, tax number and/or trade register number, postal and email address details, plus other information.

Facebook will begin banning posts, photos and other content that reference white nationalism and white separatism, revising its rules in response to criticism that a loophole had allowed racism to thrive on its platform. From a report: Previously, Facebook only had prohibited users from sharing messages that glorified white supremacy -- a rhetorical discrepancy, in the eyes of civil rights advocates, who argued that white nationalism, supremacy and separatism are indistinguishable and that the policy undermined the tech giant's stepped-up efforts to combat hate speech online. Facebook now agrees with that analysis, [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] according to people who've been briefed on the decision. The new policy also applies to Instagram. The rise and spread of white nationalism on Facebook were thrown into sharp relief in the wake of the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when self-avowed white nationalists used the social networking site as an organizing tool.

Citing new warnings from several analysts, Fortune reports that Facebook's business model now faces threats from "a growing array of bi-partisan criticism and fresh regulatory issues." Analysts are now flagging an opinion piece in The New York Times, by Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, a Democrat who's chairman of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. Cicilline wrote about the company's "pattern of misconduct" and called for "an investigation into whether Facebook's conduct has violated antitrust laws."

"Investors should pay attention to the fact that there are people sitting in some very relevant seats that are attacking Facebook in ways that we have not seen in our almost two decade history of covering internet companies," Stifel's Scott Devitt wrote in a note. Recent issues may be transient, Devitt said, and Facebook shares may prove cheap relative to the company's earnings power, but "something feels very different to us this time." He flagged Cicilline's item as "further evidence that this may be more than a passing fad." He rates Facebook shares hold.

Beacon Policy Advisors said in a note that "the potential action that regulators at the FTC could take against Facebook is far more significant" than rhetoric from Congress about reining the company in, whether via forced separation of Instagram or WhatsApp or by taxing companies that collect user data. A "substantial financial penalty," along with other remedies, may be part of a settlement with the FTC in the coming weeks regarding user data provided to Cambridge Analytica, they said.

Several major ISPs in Australia temporarily blocked access to 8chan, along with "dozens" of web sites that hosted video of last week's mass shooting in Christchurch New Zealand, Ars Technica reports -- noting that the ISPs acted on their own in response to "community expectations."

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan (who "cut ties" with the site in December) is now criticizing 8chan moderators for their slowness in removing posts inciting violence, including last week's post from the Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant: Their reluctance to do so, along with the proliferation of posts on 8chan praising Tarrant's actions, have persuaded Brennan that the toxic, white-supremacist culture that lives on parts of the site could someday be linked to another mass shooting....

Brennan, 25 years old, expressed regret that the site had consumed so much of his life. "I didn't spend enough time making friends in real life," he said. High-school events and classes in upstate New York didn't matter to him at all. What mattered was the community of like-minded provocateurs, trolls, libertarians and conservative thinkers he discovered online as a boy and that formed his identity as a young man. "I just feel like I wasted too much time on this stuff," he said.
Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell (in a Post video) argues that 8chan "has grown from this central place for tech libertarians, trolls, just people looking to get a rise out of other people online, and it's really radicalized into this place of overt neo-Nazi, white supremacist, racist, sexist, anti-everything discourse...

"We haven't really reckoned with how to deal with the negative parts of easy and free and anonymous connectivity around the world, and there's no real good mechanism for solving a problem like that."

A group of researchers claims to have built a prototype for an "online polygraph" that uses machine learning to detect deception from text alone. But as a few machine learning academics point out, what these researchers have actually demonstrated is the inherent danger of overblown machine learning claims. From a report: When Wired showed the study to a few academics and machine learning experts, they responded with deep skepticism. Not only does the study not necessarily serve as the basis of any kind of reliable truth-telling algorithm, it makes potentially dangerous claims: A text-based "online polygraph" that's faulty, they warn, could have far worse social and ethical implications if adopted than leaving those determinations up to human judgment.

"It's an eye-catching result. But when we're dealing with humans, we have to be extra careful, especially when the implications of whether someone's lying could lead to conviction, censorship, the loss of a job," says Jevin West, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington and a noted critic of machine learning hype. "When people think the technology has these abilities, the implications are bigger than a study."

Services like Google's Stadia seem convenient, but they could completely change the past and future of video games, writes Rich Whitehouse, a video game preservationist and veteran programmer in the video game industry. From the story: For most of today's games, modding isn't an especially friendly process. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, people like me are digging into these games and reverse engineering data formats in order to create tools which allow users to mod the games. Once that data starts only existing on a server somewhere, we can no longer see it, and we can no longer change it. I expect some publishers/developers to respond to this by explicitly supporting modifications in their games, but ultimately, this will come with limitations and, most likely, censorship. As such, this represents an end of an era, where we're free to dig into these games and make whatever we want out of them. As someone who got their start in game development through modding, I think this sucks. It is also arguably not a healthy direction for the video game industry to head in. Dota 2, Counter-Strike, and other massively popular games that generate millions of dollars annually, all got their start as user-modifications of existing video games from big publishers. Will we still get the new Counter-Strike if users can't mod their games?

[...] The bigger problem here, as I see it, is analysis and preservation. There is so much more history to a video game than the playable end result conveys. When the data and code driving a game exists only on a remote server, we can't look at it, and we can't learn from it. Reverse engineering a game gives us tons of insight into its development, from lost and hidden features to actual development decisions. Indeed, even with optimizing compilers and well-defined dependency trees which help to cull unused data out of retail builds, many of the popular major releases of today have plenty waiting to be discovered and documented. We're already living in a world where the story of a game's development remains largely hidden from the public, and the bits that trickle out through presentations and conferences are well-filtered, and often omit important information merely because it might not be well-received, might make the developer look bad, etc. This ultimately offers up a deeply flawed, relatively sparse historical record.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed two censorship bills into law Monday. One bans "fake news" while the other makes it illegal to insult public officials. Ars Technica reports on the details: Under one bill, individuals can face fines and jail time if they publish material online that shows a "clear disrespect for society, the state, the official state symbols of the Russian Federation, the Constitution of the Russian Federation, and bodies exercising state power." Insults against Putin himself can be punished under the law, The Moscow Times reports. Punishments can be as high as 300,000 rubles ($4,700) and 15 days in jail.

A second bill subjects sites publishing "unreliable socially significant information" to fines as high as 1.5 million rubles ($23,000). [T]he Russian government has "essentially unconstrained authority to determine that any speech is unacceptable. One consequence may be to make it nearly impossible for individuals or groups to call for public protest activity against any action taken by the state," [analyst Matthew Rojansky told the Post]

An anonymous reader shares a report: WhatsApp is working on a major new feature to tackle the spread of misinformation on its service. The Facebook-owned chat app is internally testing a new option that would allow a user to quickly verify the legitimacy of images they have received on WhatsApp by checking if those images had ever appeared on the web before. [...] The unnamed feature relies on Google's reverse image search function to let WhatsApp users upload an image and find where it has appeared on the web. This is a clever solution by WhatsApp, which protects all messages and media content on its platform with end-to-end encryption. While hugely beneficial to end users, using encryption also significantly curtails WhatsApp's ability to scan the content of messages and media on its platform. In emerging markets, users are exhibiting a growing appetite for sharing information through images. In places like India, WhatsApp's largest market and where the service is grappling with the spread of false information, the feature could potentially help many users quickly verify facts and get more context about the image they have received.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: I've had one desire since I was born; to see my body ripped and torn. The lyrics of death metal band Bloodbath's cannibalism-themed track, Eaten, do not leave much to the imagination. But neither this song -- nor the gruesome lyrics of others of the genre -- inspire violence. That is the conclusion of Macquarie University's music lab, which used the track in a psychological test. It revealed that death metal fans are not "desensitized" to violent imagery. The findings are published in the Royal Society journal Open Science. How do scientists test people's sensitivity to violence? With a classic psychological experiment that probes people's subconscious responses; and by recruiting death metal fans to take part. The test involved asking 32 fans and 48 non-fans listen to death metal or to pop whilst looking at some pretty unpleasant images.

Lead researcher Yanan Sun explained that the aim of the experiment was to measure how much participants' brains noticed violent scenes, and to compare how their sensitivity was affected by the musical accompaniment. To test the impact of different types of music, they also used a track they deemed to be the opposite of Eaten. "We used 'Happy' by Pharrell Williams as a [comparison]," said Dr Sun. Each participant was played Happy or Eaten through headphones, while they were shown a pair of images -- one to each eye. One image showed a violent scene, such as someone being attacked in a street. The other showed something innocuous -- a group of people walking down that same street, for example. "If fans of violent music were desensitized to violence, which is what a lot of parent groups, religious groups and censorship boards are worried about, then they wouldn't show this same bias. "But the fans showed the very same bias towards processing these violent images as those who were not fans of this music."

On the occasion of the web's 30th anniversary, its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, has given some interviews and shared his thoughts on some challenges that the web faces today. He spoke with Medianama, an Indian outlet, on some of the relatively unique challenges that the government over there has been pushing lately. Some of these challenges include government's push to have Silicon Valley companies store data of Indians in India itself; a nudge to WhatsApp to put an end to its encryption (On a side note: The Australian government recently passed a law to do this exact thing); and frequent shutdowns in the nation.

On data localisation and data as a national resource : That's one of the things that the Web Foundation has always been concerned about: the balkanisation of the Internet. If you want to balkanise it, that's a pretty darn effective way of doing it. If you say that Indian people's data can't be stored outside India, that means that when you start a social network which will be accessed by people all over the world, that means that you will have to start 152 different companies all over the world. It's a barrier to entry. Facebook can do that. Google can do that.

When an Indian company does it, and you'll end up with an Indian company that serves only Indian users. When people go abroad, they won't be able to keep track of their friends at home. The whole wonderful open web of knowledge, academic and political discussions would be divided into country groups and cultural groups, so there will be a massive loss of richness to the web.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Russia has told internet providers to enforce a block against encrypted email provider ProtonMail, the company's chief has confirmed. The block was ordered by the state Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, according to a Russian-language blog, which obtained and published the order after the agency accused the company and several other email providers of facilitating bomb threats. Several anonymous bomb threats were sent by email to police in late January, forcing several schools and government buildings to evacuate.

In all, 26 internet addresses were blocked by the order, including several servers used to scramble the final connection for users of Tor, an anonymity network popular for circumventing censorship. Internet providers were told to implement the block "immediately," using a technique known as BGP blackholing, a way that tells internet routers to simply throw away internet traffic rather than routing it to its destination. But the company says while the site still loads, users cannot send or receive email. The way the KGB blocked ProtonMail is "particularly sneaky," ProtonMail chief executive Andy Yen said. "ProtonMail is not blocked in the normal way, it's actually a bit more subtle. They are blocking access to ProtonMail mail servers. So Mail.ru -- and most other Russian mail servers -- for example, is no longer able to deliver email to ProtonMail, but a Russian user has no problem getting to their inbox."

"That's because the two ProtonMail servers listed by the order are its back-end mail delivery servers, rather than the front-end website that runs on a different system," adds TechCrunch.

America now has 206 confirmed cases of measles, its highest year-to-date number in over 25 years . Now USA Today reports on how Facebook is responding: In mid-February, Facebook told USA TODAY it had "taken steps" to reduce fake health news and anti-vaxx posts and said it was considering making anti-vaccination content on its site less visible amid a measles outbreak that has reignited a conversation about preventative shots. At the time, Facebook said, "we know we have more to do...." Revealed Thursday: The social network says it will reduce distribution and provide users with "authoritative information" on the topic.

Facebook is following the lead of Pinterest, which has blocked all searches using terms related to vaccines or vaccinations as part of a plan to stop the spread of misinformation related to anti-vaxx posts.... It will reduce the ranking of Facebook groups and Pages that spread misinformation about vaccinations in News Feed and Search. "These groups and Pages will not be included in recommendations or in predictions when you type into Search," Facebook said. When it discovers ads with misinformation about vaccinations, "we will reject them." Facebook said it has removed related targeting options, like "vaccine controversies," in ads.... Additionally, Facebook said it wouldn't show or recommend content that contains misinformation about vaccinations on the Explore section of Facebook-owned Instagram or on its hashtag pages.

You asked, he answered!

Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of social networking site Minds.com, has answered more than a dozen questions that Slashdot readers sent his way. Ottman has addressed a wide-range of queries surrounding how Minds.com makes use of tokens; how many users the platform has; and, who is Minds.com aimed for. You can read his answers below. For those of you who are going to give Minds.com a try, you can find Slashdot there.

"Amazon has apparently started removing anti-vaccine documentaries from its Amazon Prime Video streaming service," reports CNN: The move came days after a CNN Business report highlighted the anti-vaccine content available on the site, and hours after Rep. Adam Schiff wrote an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, saying he is concerned "that Amazon is surfacing and recommending" anti-vaccination books and movies....

Amazon did not respond to questions about why the films are no longer available on Prime Video.

However, while some anti-vaccine videos are gone from the Prime streaming service, a number of anti-vaccine books were still available for purchase on Amazon.com when CNN Business reviewed search results on Friday afternoon, and some were still being offered for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers... Amazon also had not removed some anti-vaccine books that CNN Business had previously reported on, which users searching the site could mistake for offering neutral information accepted by the public health community.

Okian Warrior writes: Free speech social network Gab has launched a new comments platform, Dissenter, which allows users to make comments on every single website on the Internet without fear of censorship or banning. The Dissenter platform, which integrates with Gab as either a website or a browser extension, allows users to comment on any web page in the world, with the ability to upvote, downvote, and reply to other comments.

"A free, open-source utility that allows people to dissent from orthodoxy and express what they are really thinking, without fear of reprisal, is essential in order to wrest control of the Internet and public discourse from Silicon Valley tech giants," said Gab founder Andrew Torba. "Gab.com and dissenter.com lead the way in keeping the Internet free. All people are welcome to use our products to express themselves freely." One example of recent comment censorship was review website Rotten Tomatoes' removal of comments for unreleased movies this week, which the review website claimed was due to "trolling."