Internet News

China's internet censor has ordered two top news feed sites to temporarily suspend parts of their platforms for broadcasting supposedly vulgar content and failing to implement censorship measures.

Toutiao and Phoenix News, which hosts news feeds similar to Facebook will suspend current affairs and Q&A sections from Friday evening for up to 24 hours, as ordered by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC).

The censor claimed that the two platforms broadcast pornographic and vulgar information, had serious issues of misguiding people, and had an evil influence on the ecosystem of online public discourse.

China recently upped internet recently be demanding that internet that internet news providers had to appoint state-approved editors. The censors claim the measures are designed to maintain social stability as well as stamp out violence, nudity and fake news.

A parliamentary committee is trying to get heavy with Facebook and Twitter over the release of details about Russian elections interference.

Damian Collins, chair of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport select committee, which is looking into so-called fake news, has given the companies until 18 January to correct their failure to hand over information he requested about Russian misinformation campaigns on their platforms. He said:

There has to be a way of scrutinising the procedures that companies like Facebook put in place to help them identify known sources of disinformation, particularly when it's politically motivated and coming from another country.

They need to be able to tell us what they can do about it. And what we need to be able to do is say to the companies: we recognise that you are best placed to monitor what is going on your own site and to get the balance right in taking action against it but also safeguarding the privacy of users.

But what there has to be then is some mechanism of saying: if you fail to do that, if you ignore requests to act, if you fail to police the site effectively and deal with highly problematic content, then there has to be some sort of sanction against you.

In a letter to Twitter this month, Collins wrote:

The information you have now shared with us is completely inadequate ... It seems odd that so far we have received more information about activities that have taken place on your platform from journalists and academics than from you.

Vietnam's regime has revealed that it has hired an enormous 10,000 people to work in a new cyber warfare unit, known as Force 47. Its main aim is to battle 'wrong' views being spread online.

The announcement came in a speech on Christmas Day given by Nguyen Trong Nghia, a senior lieutenant-general in the Vietnam Communist Party's People's Army. According to state-run media outlets, Lt Gen Nguyen claimed that enemies of the Communist party were currently able to create chaos online.

As a result, it claimed it was necessary that in every hour, minute, and second we must be ready to fight proactively against the wrong views. The new Force 47 has already been compared to the so-called 50-cent army employed by the Communist regime in neighbouring China, who are paid 50 cents for every website they highlight that breaches regulations.

The Indonesian government is set to use a 'censorship machine' starting next year to surf the net to block porn.

The machine would begin operations in January after a handover process on Dec. 29, Communications and Information Ministry's information applications director general Samuel Abrijani said.

The censorship machine uses a crawling system to automatically analyze inappropriate content based on inputs and categories set by the ministry. Samuel said the system was different to surveillance.

The ministry acquired the machine worth Rp 211 billion (US$15.6 million) through a tender process in August.

Pakistan's federal cabinet has approved an amendment to the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (Peca), 2016, aimed at bringing blasphemy and pornography within the ambit of the cybercrime law.

The issue of offences relating to blasphemy was recently taken up by the Islamabad High Court during the hearing of a petition filed against alleged uploading of supposedly objectionable material on social media.

Additional Attorney General Afnan Karim Kundi had last week informed the court that the federal government was amending Peca to include blasphemy and pornography as scheduled offences in the cybercrime law.

Facebook says it is changing how it identifies 'fake news' stories on its platform to a more effective system.

Facebook had originally put red warning signs on disputed stories that fact-checkers found false.

Instead, now it will bring up related articles next to the false stories that give context from fact-checkers on the stories'

Facebook said that in its tests, fewer hoax articles were shared when they had fact-checkers' articles spooled up next to them than when they were labeled with disputed flags.

Facebook have also changed the criteria for identification as 'fake news' Previously it required 2 fact checkers to concur but under the new system related articles can be attached under the authority of just one fact checker.

A Chinese businessman selling VPNs has fallen victim to China's censorship regime and has been jailed for 5.5 years.

Wu Xiangyang, from Pingnan county in Guangxi autonomous region received the long jail sentence alongside a fine of 500,000 yuan (£57,000).

According to a report in the Procuratorate Daily, a newspaper for the Chinese prosecution and inspection agency, he was found to be operating a VPN without the proper license. Of course the authorities would never license a censorship evading VPN).

Under reent laws, no VPN is allowed to operate in China without a license. Licenses can only be obtained from VPN systems that implement China's extreme censorship policies and block just about everything.

Wu Xiangyang is reported to have been running his VPN, called TeeVPN since 2013.