In The News

The Guardian: Facebook Bans Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army’s Posts

Julia Carrie Wong, Michael Safi and Shaikh Azizur Rahman September 20, 2017
Rohingya Muslims, long marginalized, have few resources to resist the Myanmar military and flee the nation by the thousands. Social media can be a lifeline during such chaos. Yet in the midst of humanitarian crisis, Facebook is retaining the Myanmar military’s page while putting the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army on its “most dangerous” list, prompting moderators to delete posts that praise the...

The New York Times: Fake Americans Used to Influence Election

Scott Shane September 12, 2017
Cybersecurity analysts suspect that Russian hackers created a large numbers of fictional social media accounts posing as US voters. This was followed by DCLeaks, a website designed to selectively target US candidate to channel outrage about candidates, particularly presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of...

The Telegraph: North Korea Attempted to Ship Material to Syria’s Chemical Weapons Agency, UN Experts Say

Harriet Alexander August 26, 2017
North Korea has twice attempted to ship chemical weapons to front companies for the Syrian government’s Scientific Studies and Research Center this year, according to a classified UN report. Two unnamed countries intercepted the shipments. “The shipments were sent by KOMID, the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation – an organisation blacklisted by the UN security council in 2009, and...

CNET: Yes, You're Racist: Twitter User Names Virginia Protesters

Daniel Van Boom August 14, 2017
White nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan from around the United States attended a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to oppose the community’s removal of monuments associated with the losing Confederate side of the US Civil War. Local counter-protesters opposing the extremists were attacked by a speeding vehicle with one woman killed. White supremacists are belligerent...

CSM: Tech Companies Caught Between US, EU Ideals

Amanda Paulson June 28, 2017
A recent cluster of terrorist attacks has prompted French and British politicians to introduce regulation imposing financial penalties on internet firms that do not sufficiently curtail the flow of extremist propaganda. As a result, YouTube, its parent company Google, and Facebook announced their own plans to preempt these laws that could negatively affect their financial bottom line as well as...

Bloomberg: Comey’s Firing Helps Demean the US Globally

Leonid Bershidsky May 10, 2017
US intelligence officials maintain that Russia interfered in the US presidential election with false news spread over social media to discredit Hillary Clinton. The inexpensive campaign succeeded beyond Russians' wildest expectations. The US Russia scandal is “eating the U.S. from the inside, undermining the country's global role at least as much as President Donald Trump's erratic...

El Pais: Free Speech in the Twitter Era

Vera Gutiérrez Calvo May 3, 2017
Spain is debating whether some topics are off limits, even terror groups from long ago, now defunct, on social media – and “how to tackle hatred, humiliation and disrespect without being disproportionate and arbitrary,” reports Vera Gutiérrez Calvo for El Pais. “Sources from the central High Court and prosecutor offices state that jokes in themselves are not being prosecuted as crimes, but that...