Share prices of Google parent company Alphabet have plunged after the tech giant reported slowing revenue growth, with brands pulling ads from YouTube amid concerns over the site’s ‘harmful content’. Google founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt had about $9 billion wiped from their collective net worths as the stock plunged in early trading on Tuesday. Alphabet shares... 

In stark contrast to attempts in numerous western countries to stifle free speech online, Russian President Vladimir Putin defended Internet freedom during a conference earlier today. When rulers of authoritarian regimes are more pro-freedom than western leaders, you know we’re in trouble. Putin told the Russian Internet Governance Forum, “I am confident that we should continue to follow the principle... 

The Trump regime is finally suing social media giant Facebook for being racist! Yaaaay finally! Something is being done, told you so but you people didn’t wanna listen, we told you numerous times Trump was just playing 4D intergalactic ULTRA HD CHESS! You see?? He was just playing chess all along, he was light-years ahead of us simpletons, after all his IQ is 160!!!!!!!! He waited until the... 

The European Parliament has voted to adopt the highly controversial Article 13 provision which would govern the production and distribution of content online under the auspices of increasing copyright protections. Tuesday’s move will update the EU’s 20-year-old copyright rules and will govern audiovisual content, much to the dismay of many social media users who have already begun outpouring... 

Even though the German CDU and SPD both agreed in their coalition agreement that there would be no upload filters this promise is now to be broken, but instead of admitting mistakes and owning the demonstrations they are now blaming the USA. The official CDU/CSU-account tweets: “When American corporations with massive use of disinformation and paid protesters attempt to block bills our democracy... 

The video caused quite a stir after PewDiePie retweeted it, with people both praising its creator’s skill and effort, and blasting the upcoming EU copyright reform. It seems that Swedish Internet celebrity Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, has taken a small break from his tense contest with major Indian record label and movie studio T-Series for the title of the most subscribed channel... 

The EU’s commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager, said Wednesday that Google must pay 1.49 billion euros ($1.69 billion) for stifling competition in the online advertisement sector. In a statement Wednesday the European Commission said Google had placed exclusivity contracts on publishers, stopping them from including search results from Google’s rivals. It said these clauses were replaced... 

Google banned a video explaining Christian teaching on same-sex marriage from advertising on YouTube after backlash from upset employees, according to internal Google communications reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The video was flagged in June 2018 in an internal listserv, “Yes at Google,” which is run by Google’s human resources department, according to those communications and... 

Though Western media outlets are whining about these new laws in Russia and complaining about how authoritarian they are, the reality is most Western governments’ laws are even worse Russian officials are citing authoritarian censorship laws passed by European governments as a justification for passing similar laws restricting free speech in Russia. From The Moscow Times: Russian President Vladimir... 

The New Zealand government is now looking at banning semi-automatic weapons following the killing of 49 Muslim worshipers at two Christchurch mosques, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said because the white terrorist had bought 5 guns legally. Yeah sure so let’s ban guns in New Zealand now… and then they wonder why people are into conspiracy theories and calling these attacks “false... 

A YouTube spokesperson told BuzzFeed that “[a]s part of our ongoing efforts to build a better news experience on YouTube, we are expanding our information panels to bring fact checks from eligible publishers to YouTube.” While this was originally launched to combat serious and malicious misinformation in places like India, there is concern that it will be weaponized in the future. As of now, the... 

Health professionals and policymakers see vaccination skeptics as a public menace, but forcing Facebook, YouTube, Amazon and others to shut them down has its own hazards, and probably won’t work either. From giving a hero’s welcome in Congress to the Ohio teen who defied his mother to get his jab, to a slew of editorials, to panicked statements from public officials about the return of measles... 

The UK is rolling out a draconian new ‘harmful content’ policy that will punish social media with massive fines if they fail to remove ill-defined “hate speech”, “misinformation”, and “problematic content” quickly enough, RT.com writes. An “independent tech regulator” would have the power to impose fines amounting to as much as 4 percent of a company’s value if Facebook, Google,... 

Over the past three months, I interviewed a dozen current and former employees of Cognizant in Phoenix. All had signed non-disclosure agreements with Cognizant in which they pledged not to discuss their work for Facebook — or even acknowledge that Facebook is Cognizant’s client. The shroud of secrecy is meant to protect employees from users who may be angry about a content moderation decision... 

Despite employing a small army of ‘anti-extremist’ flaggers, YouTube somehow overlooked an entire prison block of pedophiles on its platform. Is the video-sharing site wasting too many resources censoring political content? Last week, a regular guy named Matt Watson, working at his home computer, shook the wired world to its very foundations by providing convincing evidence that YouTube supports...