1H 2017 Quick Links Part 7 (Fake News, RTBF, Censorship, Extremist Content)

Fake News

* NY Times: From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece

* Data and Society: Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online

* Wired: Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex

* Mark Verstraete, Derek E. Bambauer, & Jane R. Bambauer, Identifying and Countering Fake News:

* Combating Fake News: An Agenda for Research and Action, May 2017

* David O. Klein and Joshua R. Wueller, Fake News: A Legal Perspective, Journal of Internet law, April 2017

* Columbia Journalism Review: Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda

* ABA Journal: Lies and Libel: Fake news lacks straightforward cure

* Time: Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America

* WSJ: Document: Russia Uses Rigged Polls, Fake News to Sway Foreign Elections

* NY Times: With Big Red Stamp, Russia Singles Out What It Calls ‘Fake’ News

* NY Times: The Battle Over Your Political Bubble

* Ars Technica: State Department concocting “fake” intellectual property “Twitter feud”

* Washington Post: Spreading fake news becomes standard practice for governments across the world

Right to be Forgotten

* Techcrunch: Google wins ‘right to be forgotten’ battle in Japan

* Michael  Geist: Did a Canadian court just establish a new right to be forgotten online?

* From India: The Supreme Court of India today directed Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to set up an in-house mechanism to remove online search results, which has “potential to go counter”to Section 22 of the Pre-Conception & Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 (Act).

* Techdirt: Feds Say Jewelry Company CEO Scrubbed Google Results With Fake Court Orders And Forged Judge’s Signatures

* In IMDb v. Becerra, the case over the statute requiring the removal of actors’ age information from IMDb’s database, the court blasted California’s discovery requests:

the government’s discovery requests are more than annoying. They’re disturbing….It’s one thing for a legislature to enact a speech restriction without an adequate justification. That sometimes happens. It’s another thing for the government’s lawyers to double down on their client’s constitutional error by imposing irrelevant, burdensome, even harassing discovery obligations on a party that seeks only to vindicate its First Amendment rights in court. That should never happen.

* The Street: A “right to be forgotten”/expungement in FINRA’s BrokerCheck reputational database makes it of dubious credibility

Censorship

* Milton Mueller: Internet Fragmentation Exists, But Not In the Way That You Think

* NY Times: Clearing Out the App Stores: Government Censorship Made Easier

* Vice: Apple’s Long History of Rejecting ‘Objectionable Content’ From the App Store

* Nathan Cortez, Regulation by Database, University of Colorado Law Review, Vol. 89, 2017. A critical examination of how it’s different when governments publish information about their constituents, especially for purposes of shaming them.

* Reuters: North Korea uses sophisticated tools to spy on citizens digitally – report

* Inside Higher Ed: “The University of California, Berkeley, will cut off public access to tens of thousands of video lectures and podcasts in response to a U.S. Justice Department order that it make the educational content accessible to people with disabilities.”  If you’re looking for paper topic, the ADA as a censorship tool might be an intriguing one.

* Bored Panda: Artist Uses 100,000 Banned Books To Build A Full-Size Parthenon At Historic Nazi Book Burning Site

China

* TorrentFreak: China Bans Unauthorized VPN Services in Internet Crackdown

* Reuters: China to further tighten its internet controls

* Reuters: ‘Sing the motherland’: China tightens rules for online content. Followup: China’s bloggers, filmmakers feel chill of internet crackdown

* Reuters: China’s cyber watchdog orders top tech platforms to increase self-censorship

* Reuters: Apple is removing VPN services from China App Store: providers

* NY Times: Silicon Valley Giants Confront New Walls in China

* NY Times: Apple Removes Apps From China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

* NY Times: Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors

* Reuters: China not to license Pokemon Go, similar games as it weighs security risks

Russia

* Reporters Without Borders: Russian parliament certifies free Internet’s death

* Reuters: Putin bans VPNs to stop Russians accessing prohibited websites

Extremist Content

* Wired: The One Hire Facebook Really Needs to Make to Curb Violence

* Facebook: Hard Questions: How We Counter Terrorism

* The Switch: Facebook adds 3,000 employees to screen for violence as it nears 2 billion users

* Wired: AI Isn’t Smart Enough (Yet) to Spot Horrific Facebook Videos

* Daphne Keller: Making Google the Censor:

making private companies curtail user expression in important public forums — which is what platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become — is dangerous. The proposed laws would harm free expression and information access for journalists, political dissidents and ordinary users. Policy makers should be candid about these consequences and not pretend that Silicon Valley has silver-bullet technology that can purge the internet of extremist content without taking down important legal speech with it….Governments that outsource speech control to private companies can effectively achieve censorship by proxy….Filters that can find child sexual abuse images work relatively well because those images are illegal in every instance. But violent and extremist material is different. Almost any such image or video is legal in some context. Filters can’t tell the difference between footage used for terrorist recruitment and the same footage used for journalism, political advocacy or human rights efforts.

* Google: Four steps we’re taking today to fight terrorism online

* The Guardian: Revealed: Facebook exposed identities of moderators to suspected terrorists

* Wired: Hacking Online Hate Means Talking to the Humans Behind It

* The Guardian: May and Macron plan joint crackdown on online terror

* Washington Post: YouTube is tricking people who search for ISIS videos

* YouTube: An update on our commitment to fight terror content online

* EFF: Industry Efforts to Censor Pro-Terrorism Online Content Pose Risks to Free Speech

* EFF: Payment Processors Are Profiling Heavy Metal Fans as Terrorists