July 16, 2022

TorrentFreak: Google Delists Hundreds of Pirate Bay Domains From UK Search Results

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.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
July 12, 2022

The Guardian: Tech platforms face UK ban on blocking news providers before appeal

The Guardian: Tech platforms face UK ban on blocking news providers before appeal. “A change to the online safety bill means that articles in breach of a service’s terms and conditions cannot be removed or hidden until the publisher has been notified and has received the verdict of any appeal to the platform. The amendment to the legislation is intended to avoid a repeat of an incident last year when YouTube suddenly banned the digital station TalkRadio from its platform for violating its content guidelines. It was reinstated 12 hours later.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
July 1, 2022

Boing Boing: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning instructions, but leaves up the lethal tips

Boing Boing: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning instructions, but leaves up the lethal tips. “It is extraordinarily dangerous, and dozens of people have been killed following instructions contained in viral videos. Ann Reardon recently posted a thorough debunking of the method, which quickly became popular in its own right… But YouTube has removed Reardon’s video, claiming it is harmful and dangerous—while leaving up fractal wood burning videos demonstrating methods that have killed, at latest count, 34 people in America.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
June 29, 2022

Rest of World: Argentina’s Supreme Court backs Google, says “right to be forgotten” can infringe on freedom of information

Rest of World: Argentina’s Supreme Court backs Google, says “right to be forgotten” can infringe on freedom of information. “The Argentine Supreme Court denied celebrity Natalia Denegri’s petition to have content about a scandal she was involved in more than 25 years ago removed from search engines on Tuesday. It is the first ruling by a Supreme Court in Latin America on the ‘right to be forgotten,’ which allows the public to control their online history.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
June 9, 2022

Washington Post: Facebook’s ban on gun sales gives sellers 10 strikes before booting them

Washington Post: Facebook’s ban on gun sales gives sellers 10 strikes before booting them. “Facebook prohibits gun sales on its service. But buyers and sellers can violate the rule 10 times before they are kicked off the social network, according to internal guidance obtained by The Washington Post. The policy, which has not previously been reported, is much more lenient than for users who post child pornography, which is illegal, or a terrorist image on Facebook, which prompts immediate removal from the platform.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
May 21, 2022

New York Times: The Enduring Afterlife of a Mass Shooting’s Livestream Online

New York Times: The Enduring Afterlife of a Mass Shooting’s Livestream Online. “In a search spanning 24 hours this week, The New York Times identified more than 50 clips and online links with the Christchurch gunman’s 2019 footage. They were on at least nine platforms and websites, including Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, 4chan and the video site Rumble, according to The Times’s review…. The clips and links were not difficult to find, even though Facebook, Twitter and other platforms pledged in 2019 to eradicate the footage, pushed partly by public outrage over the incident and by world governments.”

Tweaks & Updates 0
May 17, 2022

Ars Technica: Apple and Google’s outdated apps ban would cut each store by a third

Ars Technica: Apple and Google’s outdated apps ban would cut each store by a third. “Both members of our favorite mobile duopoly, Google and Apple, recently announced plans to cull outdated apps in their respective app stores. Last month, both companies decided any app that hadn’t been updated in two years would be removed. Early in April, Google announced a two-year cutoff plan that would kick-in in November, and later in the month, Apple started emailing developers, giving them 30 days’ notice to update or be removed. It’s hard to know what culling two-year-old apps will look like, so exactly how many apps are we talking about?”

Tweaks & Updates 0
May 9, 2022

Search Engine Land: DMCA request removes Moz from Google Search index

Search Engine Land: DMCA request removes Moz from Google Search index. “If you search for [Moz] in Google Search, you won’t be seeing the moz.com home page, that page was removed from the Google index due to a DMCA takedown request. The takedown complaint cites that Moz’s home page, along with 185 other URLs were ‘distribute modified, cracked and unauthorized versions’ of the Dr. Driving app.” Moz has since been restored.

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
April 28, 2022

Social media giants failing to combat ‘blatant and easy to find’ anti-Muslim hate speech (Radio New Zealand)

Radio New Zealand: Social media giants failing to combat ‘blatant and easy to find’ anti-Muslim hate speech. “The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an American non-profit organisation, says social media platforms collectively failed to act on 89 percent of posts containing anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia, even after they were reported to moderators. YouTube was the worst offender, ignoring 100 percent of anti-Muslim and Islamophobic posts. Twitter failed to act on 97 percent, Facebook ignored 94 percent, Instagram 86 percent and TikTok 64 percent. The CCDH flagged 530 posts, viewed at least 25 million times.”

Research & Opinion 0
April 27, 2022

Engadget: You can now ask Google to remove phone numbers from search results

Engadget: You can now ask Google to remove phone numbers from search results. “Google has long accepted requests to remove some personal information from search results, but now that option should be considerably more useful. Google has expanded the policy to let you ask for the removal of contact info like phone numbers, email addresses and physical addresses. You can also have Google remove login credentials if they pop up in queries.”

Tweaks & Updates 0
April 25, 2022

TorrentFreak: Google Voluntarily Removes More Pirate Sites From its Search Results

TorrentFreak: Google Voluntarily Removes More Pirate Sites From its Search Results. “Over the past months, it has become clear that Google is voluntarily helping rightsholders to tackle online piracy. The search giant has now removed another batch of ‘pirate site’ URLs from its results in the Netherlands, just days after a local ISP was ordered to block them. While it’s a big step to take, Google hasn’t yet commented on the matter.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
April 21, 2022

The Advocate: He livestreamed a killing. Facebook alerted police, deleted the video, but duplicates spread.

The Advocate: He livestreamed a killing. Facebook alerted police, deleted the video, but duplicates spread.. “One of the videos was viewed 16,000 times and shared 191 more. Another logged 56,000 views and 2,300 shares. There were at least 10, all showing Janice David being stabbed to death…. despite Meta’s efforts to stop the footage from circulating, clips of the video reposted by other users remained on Facebook for at least 24 hours after [Earl Lee] Johnson’s arrest. They ranged in length from 23 seconds to nearly two minutes.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
April 20, 2022

Reuters: Exclusive-Vietnam plans 24-hour take-down law for “illegal” social media content -sources

Reuters: Exclusive-Vietnam plans 24-hour take-down law for “illegal” social media content -sources. “Vietnam is preparing new rules requiring social media firms to take down content it deems illegal within 24 hours, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said. The planned amendments to current law will cement Vietnam, a $1 billion market for Facebook, as one of the world’s most stringent regimes for social media firms and will strengthen the ruling Communist Party’s hand as it cracks down on ‘anti-state’ activity.”

Security & Legal Issues 0

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