Internet News

The government is pushing forward with an internet censorship bill which will punish people and companies for getting it wrong without the expense and trouble of tying to dictate rules on what is allowed.

In an interesting development the Times is reporting that the government want to introduce a "senior management liability", under which executives could be held personally responsible for breaches of standards. US tech giants would be required to appoint a British-based director, who would be accountable for any breaches of the censorship rules.

It seems a little unjust to prosecute a token fall guy who is likely to have absolutely no say in the day to day decisions made by a foreign company. Still it should be a very well paid job which hopefully includes lots of coverage for legal bills and a zero notice period allowing instant resignation at the first hint of trouble.

The BBC has posted an interesting review of internet and general control freakery in China. One interesting idea was the use of numbers for hash tag rallying calls as numbers can be pretty hard to censor by text filtering. The BBC explains:

Late last year, the term 996 cropped up on a number of social media microblogs and forums, originally by workers in China's tech industry as a subtle way to vent their frustrations at the excessive amount of work they were expected to do.

The Chinese censors struggle to censor number sequences, given that they can often be innocuous. Consequently, Weibo users were able to use the term 996 to complain openly that their employer was violating China's labour laws by making them work some 72 hours a week: from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

But the phrase has now seen expanded usage beyond the tech industry, especially among China's young, who complained that overtime has become an epidemic.

Britain's first police unit for tackling supposed online hate crime has brought charges against less than 1% of the cases it has investigated.

Scotland Yard's online hate crime hub has logged 1,851 incidents since its launch in April 2017 and 17 cases, or 0.92%, resulted in charges. And of those seven have led to prosecutions, Freedom of Information figures show. There are three more cases pending a charging decision from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

The £1.7million scheme, launched by London mayor Sadiq Khan, has however resulted in 59 being given youth referrals, harassment warnings or have been noted as apologising.

The Metropolitan Police said the £326,344 needed for the pilot year of the hub was funded by the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC). Following the trial, a unit of five officers led by a detective inspector was given a £323,829 budget for 2018/19 and £363,000 in 2019/20 by the police force.

Scotland Yard said the unit now deals with both online and offline cases, reviewing every hate crime reported to the Met on a daily basis.

The low number of charges is thought to be due to the high CPS charging threshold for online hate, and the difficulties investigators face in obtaining information from social media companies.

The French government has come up with an innovative way of financing a program of mass social media, surveillance, to use it to detect tax fraud.

The self financing surveillance scheme has now been given the go the constitutional court. Customs and tax officials will be allowed to review users' profiles, posts and pictures for evidence of undisclosed income.

In its ruling, the court acknowledged that users' privacy and freedom of expression could be compromised, but its applied caveats to the legislation. It said authorities would have to ensure that password-protected content was off limits and that they would only be able to use public information pertaining to the person divulging it online. However the wording suggests that the non public data is available and can be used for other more covert reasons.

The mass collection of data is part of a three-year online monitoring experiment by the French government and greatly increases the state's online surveillance powers.

A few unelected members of the House of Lords are introducing their own internet censorship law because they think it is unreasonable to wait a year for the government to work through the issues.

Tom McNally, previously involved in TV censorship law has challenged the Government to back his proposed new law. This is set to be introduced in the House or Lord on January 14.

The bill gives Ofcom censorship powers requiring that internet companies accept a duty of care with provisions to be enforced by Ofcom.

McNally told The Daily Telegraph:

We are in danger of losing a whole year on this. The Government's commitment to develop safer internet legislation in the Queen's Speech, though welcome, did not go far enough.

The Government has yet to reveal the findings from its consultation on its White Paper which was published in the Summer. The results had been expected before the end of this year but have been delayed by the general election.

McNally is drafting the bill with the Carnegie Trust who campaign for internet censorship in the name of thinking of the children. Lord Puttnam and Baroness Kidron, the film director and children's internet rights campaigner are being canvassed as sponsors of the bill.

Turkey blocked Wikipedia in April 2017 after the online encyclopedia refused to remove terrorism related content that the government didn't like.

The censorship has just been reversed by Constitutional Court, the nation's highest court, which called the ruling a violation of freedom of expression, and ordered the site to be unblocked

Update: Back online

17th January 2020. See article from theverge.com

Wikipedia is back online in Turkey after two-year ban is overturned

The site has been banned in the country since April 2017.

YouTube has been censoring cryptocurrency-related content with a new wave of rule enforcements, according to several hosts. Since 23rd December, the site has been deleting individual videos from cryptocurrency channels. Some hosts have also been given warnings and strikes, which temporarily prevent them from uploading content.

YouTube has not publicly stated that crypto videos are against its rules, meaning that users must read between the lines to deduce what is being targeted.

A leading YouTube creator, Chris Dunn, has noted that his own videos were removed on the grounds that they were responsible for the sale of regulated goods and contained harmful and dangerous content.

Many YouTube hosts are now considering moving to decentralized and uncensorable video platforms, such as PeerTube, LBRY, BitChute, and DTube. Incidentally, Twitter is also planning to create a decentralized media platform.

Update: Removing hundreds of videos was an 'error'

27th December 2019. See article from decrypt.co

YouTube said today that its removal of hundreds of crypto-related video sites earlier this week was an 'error'. YouTuve told Decrypt that the sites have since been put back online. However, a quick check today indicated that none had yet been restored. YouTube spouted:

With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it.

Offsite Update: After the dust has settled YouTube re-censors the crypto channels

23rd January 2020. See article from ibtimes.com

Russia has said that it has successfully tested its sovereign internet, a country-wide alternative to the global internet.

RuNet, as the internet service is known , was tested on Monday to ensure the security of its internet infrastructure in case the country would like to cut itself off from the global internet.

Deputy communications minister Alexei Sokolov said the results of the tests would be presented to President Vladimir Putin, and added that the drills would continue in the future.

Four telecoms operators took part, with 18 different scenarios tested.

Internet rights activists have noted that the measures could tighten censorship and lead to online isolation. Russian authorities also tried to ensure that it was possible to intercept mobile phone traffic and text messages, Sokolov said.