WIRED: How an Iowa School District Used ChatGPT to Ban Books. “Using ChatGPT’s guidance, the Mason City Community School District removed 19 titles—including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Toni Morrison’s Beloved—from its library shelves. But there is another truth: Educators who must comply with vague laws about ‘age-appropriate’ books with ‘descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act’ have only so many options.”
Deutsche Welle: Germany says Charming Kitten hackers target Iran dissidents. “Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has warned dissident Iranian activists about the threat of cyber espionage against them. The hackers work by gaining the trust of their targets.”
Institute of Development Studies: A new era of digital citizenship in Africa. “With contributions from scholars across the continent, Digital Citizenship in Africa illustrates how citizens have been using social media to run hashtag campaigns and VPNs, encryption and privacy protecting browsers to resist limits on their rights to privacy and political speech. In each chapter authors show how positive examples of digital citizenship are limited and constrained by new forms of digital authoritarianism: internet shutdowns, repressive laws, and by state surveillance and disinformation.”
New York Times: As Iraq Tries to Chill Critics, Its Newest Target Is Social Media. “This crackdown on social media is relatively new, but is of a piece with a broader campaign to silence, sideline or co-opt those who publicly question or criticize the government. That wider effort traces its roots to the months of demonstrations in 2019 and 2020, when young Iraqis poured into the streets demanding an end to corruption, a reduction in Iranian influence in Iraq and a new era of openness.”
MIT News: How an “AI-tocracy” emerges . “Caption:MIT economist Martin Beraja is co-author of a new research paper showing that China’s increased investments in AI-driven facial-recognition technology both help the regime repress dissent and may drive the technology forward, a mutually reinforcing condition the paper’s authors call an ‘AI-Tocracy.’”
The Register: China outsources censorship to web giants to break the fake news business model . “Revealed on Monday, the 13 rules apply to ‘self-media’ – publishers and social media accounts not operated or approved by government, and therefore the responsibility of social media and hosting platforms. Platforms will have to enhance review processes for new accounts and name changes. Accounts with political, government, military or media logos must be manually reviewed, and blocked if found to be imposters.”
New York Times: China Took Her Husband. She Was Left to Uncover His Secret Cause.. “He was brilliant, quirky and intensely private — and also, she now suspects, an anonymous dissident blogger who had won fame for years of evading the surveillance state.”
Business Insider: A Saudi woman was given 30 years in prison for criticizing the Neom megacity project on Twitter. “Saudi Arabia imprisoned a woman for 30 years for criticizing the Neom megacity project on Twitter, according to an activist group. ALQST, a UK-based human rights group, said a Saudi court sentenced Fatima al-Shawarbi to 30 years during a recent appeal hearing.”
Coda: In Hong Kong, a digital memorial of the Tiananmen Square massacre disappears. “On Tuesday, I decided to go back and look at Weiboscope, a gripping digital archive of photos, art and messages censored on social media in China for their connection with the 1989 democracy movement. But all I found was a blank page. Weiboscope — a joint project of the University of Hong Kong and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab — still has a domain, but the archive itself is gone.”
Associated Press: The cyber gulag: How Russia tracks, censors and controls its citizens. “Rights advocates say that Russia under President Vladimir Putin has harnessed digital technology to track, censor and control the population, building what some call a ‘cyber gulag’ — a dark reference to the labor camps that held political prisoners in Soviet times. It’s new territory, even for a nation with a long history of spying on its citizens.”
Associated Press: Comedian Uncle Roger silenced on Chinese social media after jokes about China. “A Malaysian comedian better known for mocking attempts by Western chefs at Asian cooking has had his Chinese social media account suspended after making jokes about China. Nigel Ng, who uses the name Uncle Roger, is the latest comedian to feel the consequences of jokes that could be perceived as reflecting negatively on China under increasingly intense censorship and rising nationalism.”
Ars Technica: Musk defends enabling Turkish censorship on Twitter, calling it his “choice”. “This weekend, Twitter restricted access to some tweets in Turkey at the request of the Turkish government ahead of its next presidential election. Twitter’s compliance silenced accounts that had been critical of the Turkish government, Business Insider reported. It also prompted a wave of criticism directed at Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who seemingly once again abandoned his free speech principles to comply with the Turkish government order.”
Techdirt: Twitter Abruptly Stops Reporting On Gov’t Requests As Data Reveals Elon Obeys Gov’t Demands Way More Often Than Old Twitter. “Russel Brandom over at Rest of World, realized that Twitter has still been automatically reporting government demand info to the good folks at the LumenDatabase… and from that found that Elon’s Twitter has been way more compliant in giving in to exactly what governments are demanding, both for removing content and for handing over information.”
The Citizen Lab: Missing Links: A comparison of search censorship in China. “Across eight China-accessible search platforms analyzed — Baidu, Baidu Zhidao, Bilibili, Microsoft Bing, Douyin, Jingdong, Sogou, and Weibo — we discovered over 60,000 unique censorship rules used to partially or totally censor search results returned on these platforms.”
Japan Times: Hong Kong student arrested over comments made on social media while in Japan. “Amid growing fears of China’s crackdown on free speech, a Hong Kong student studying at a Japanese university was arrested upon returning home last month over comments made on social media during her time in Japan.”
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