Internet freedom is declining globally and China is being blamed for exporting censorship

A new report out this week shows that China is by far the most effective censor of the internet, and far from retreating, is exporting its model around the world. Beijing has consistently defied all the confident predictions (including by people far more knowledgeable about the internet than Clinton) that this would be impossible. China’s …

PayPal, Stripe, GoDaddy and other platforms throw GAB offline

Gab,social media site is being de-platformed and forced offline by its service providers after it became clear that the alleged Pittsburgh shooter Robert Bowers had a history of anti-semitic postings on the site. In the hours following the attack, when the suspect’s postings were discovered on the site, Gab’s corporate partners abandoned it one by …

Facebook Glitch prevented users who posted a lot from deleting their accounts

Every few months, there’s a new Facebook scandal that results in a #deletefacebook campaign. According to a new report, there was a bug that inhibited users who had “a large number of posts” from deleting their Facebook accounts. However, after the publication reached out to the social network, an engineer resolved the issue, which was …

Facebook faces more sanctions over ‘misleading’ T&Cs EU warns

Brussels has warned Facebook it will face sanctions unless it changes what the European commission calls its “misleading” terms and conditions. The EU commissioner in charge of consumer protection, Věra Jourová, said she had run out of patience with the social network after nearly two years of discussions aimed at giving Facebook’s European users more …

EU approves controversial copyright law that ‘could kill off the web’s user-generated content’

The European Parliament has approved a controversial copyright law that threatens to ‘destroy the internet as we know it’, according to digital rights groups. Yesterday, in a vote that split almost every major EU party, Members of the European Parliament adopted every terrible proposal in the new Copyright Directive and rejected every good one, setting the …

Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp hit by an outage

Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp users were in a frenzy after many attempted to log in today only to find that the sites were down. The outage appeared to have affected users around the world, with thousands of reports within the first hour. According to Down Detector, the outages appear to have started around 4:48 p.m. …

Twitter CEO Loses 200,000 followers in Fake Follower Clean Up

Jack Dorsey, chief executive officer and co-founder, said in a tweet Thursday that he lost 200,000 followers, bringing his total down to 4 million, after Twitter made good on its pledge to remove suspicious accounts. Twitter has announced it will remove suspicious accounts from follower counts. It warned that the number of followers displayed on many profiles …