Engadget: Indonesia restores access to PayPal, Yahoo and Valve services. “Indonesia has unblocked PayPal, Steam owner Valve and Yahoo (Engadget’s parent company), allowing them to resume operations. The country prevented residents from accessing services of several companies that missed a July 29th deadline to register with a government database.”
BusinessWorld (Philippines): Facebook took down 5 million pieces of content leading up to PHL elections — Meta. “Facebook, the Meta-owned social media platform, removed five million pieces of content on Facebook and Instagram in the four months leading up to the Philippine national elections and the week following (Jan. 9–May 16).”
Reuters: Nigeria asks Google to block banned groups from YouTube. “Nigeria asked Google to block the use of YouTube channels and livestreams by banned groups and terrorist organizations in the country, Information Minister Lai Mohammed said on Thursday.”
Mint (India): Govt issued 105 orders to block social media content under new IT rules . “According to information shared by the minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar in a written reply to Rajya Sabha, 94 directions to block content were issued to YouTube between December 2021 and April 2022.”
CNBC: Meta takes down Russian troll farm. “Meta says that it’s continuing to crack down on bad actors across its social media sites. The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, reported Thursday that it had taken down a Russia-based troll farm from Instagram earlier this year that had been churning out phony posts about the war in Ukraine.”
Reuters: Italy’s communication authority fines Google over gambling advertising. “Italy’s communication authority said on Tuesday it had fined tech giant Google, owned by parent company Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), 750,000 euros ($766,350) for allegedly breaching a ban on gambling advertising on its YouTube video platform.”
PolitiFact: How will social media platforms respond to election misinformation? It isn’t clear. “As we reviewed the rules for false claims about elections and voting on social media, we found that determining what gets removed, what gets labeled and what gets downgraded isn’t straightforward. Every platform is different, and their policies aren’t always clearly outlined. Even when policies are clear, platforms may still shift them quickly without making the changes obvious to users.”
University of Michigan: Moderating online content increases accountability, but can harm some platform users . “Marginalized social media users face disproportionate content removal from platforms, but the visibility of this online moderation is a double-edged sword. A new University of Michigan study about two online platforms—Reddit and Twitch—suggests that greater visibility means increased accountability, but the actions can also bring more attention to the offensive content, further harming marginalized people.”
Engadget: Facebook faces suspension in Kenya over ethnic-based hate speech. “Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), a government agency that aims to eradicate ethnic or racial discrimination among the country’s 45 tribes, has given Facebook seven days to tackle hate speech related to next month’s election on its platform. If the social media fails to do so, it faces suspension in the country.”
MarketingBrew: Reddit’s advertising policy seems to differ from subreddit to subreddit. “R/mileycyrus. r/mensrights. r/daftpunk. r/floridaman. These are the subreddits where, for one reason or another, Reddit doesn’t appear to allow advertising, according to a third-party tool. The results, pulled from the 2,500 most popular subreddits run through an API called Pushshift, show that despite spending the last decade courting advertisers and trying to address brand-safety concerns, Reddit’s actual brand-safety approach appears to be cautious, making it seem somewhat unpredictable and inconsistent.”
TechCrunch: Twitch builds toward a ‘layered’ safety approach with new moderator tools. “On Twitch, interconnected channels already informally share information on users they prefer to keep out. The company is now formalizing that ad hoc practice with a new tool that lets channels swap ban lists, inviting communities to collaborate on locking serial harassers and otherwise disruptive users out before they can cause problems.”
WIRED: Instagram Slow to Tackle Bots Targeting Iranian Women’s Groups. “IRANIAN WOMEN’S RIGHTS groups have for months faced a deluge of bots following their Instagram accounts and disrupting their digital outreach operations. Activists say that while they have repeatedly asked Meta, Instagram’s parent company, to stymie the flood of junk followers, more keep coming, totaling in the millions across dozens of organizations operating in Iran and elsewhere around the world.”
Daily Dot: Unfair Instagram moderation of women’s bodies highlighted in a new exhibit. “Getting your content—or worse—your profile removed from a social media platform without explanation or recourse is an alienating feeling that a growing number of people are experiencing. To reflect what it can mean for people’s community, mental health, and even livelihood, London-based creative agency RANKIN launched a project meant to re-platform hundreds of people whose content had been removed from spaces like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.”
TorrentFreak: Google Delists Hundreds of Pirate Bay Domains From UK Search Results. “Google began to delist pirate sites from local search results last year. The search engine voluntarily complies with court orders targeted at third-party Internet providers. This is also true in the UK, where The Pirate Bay initially remained unblocked. A recent wave of removal requests corrected this initial oversight and hundreds of Pirate Bay domains have since been removed.”
Rest of World: “Hostage-taking laws” seem to be fueling a Twitter crackdown in India. “Increasingly popular around the world, ‘hostage-taking laws,’ are government mandates that require social media companies to have physical offices and employees in the countries where they operate. In addition to India, these laws have been put in place in Nigeria, Turkey, and Vietnam. Observers say that Twitter’s recent takedowns in India highlight how governments leverage these laws and create a regulatory environment with higher-stakes penalties, which makes it easier to demand companies to censor the speech of journalists and dissidents.”
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