Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, writing in a column for The New York Times: Were almost any country other than China involved, Mr. Trump's demands would be indefensible. But the threatened bans on TikTok and WeChat, whatever their motivations, can also be seen as an overdue response, a tit for tat, in a long battle for the soul of the internet. In China, the foreign equivalents of TikTok and WeChat -- video and messaging apps such as YouTube and WhatsApp -- have been banned for years. The country's extensive blocking, censorship and surveillance violate just about every principle of internet openness and decency. China keeps a closed and censorial internet economy at home while its products enjoy full access to open markets abroad. The asymmetry is unfair and ought no longer be tolerated. The privilege of full internet access -- the open internet -- should be extended only to companies from countries that respect that openness themselves. Behind the TikTok controversy is an important struggle between two dueling visions of the internet. The first is an older vision: the idea that the internet should, in a neutral fashion, connect everyone, and that blocking and censorship of sites by nation-states should be rare and justified by more than the will of the ruler. The second and newer vision, of which China has been the leading exponent, is "net nationalism," which views the country's internet primarily as a tool of state power. Economic growth, surveillance and thought control, from this perspective, are the internet's most important functions. China, in furtherance of this vision, bans not only most foreign competitors to its tech businesses but also foreign sources of news, religious instruction and other information, while using the internet to promote state propaganda and engage in foreign electoral interference.

For many years, laboring under the vain expectation that China, succumbing to inexorable world-historical forces, would become more like us, Western democracies have allowed China to exploit this situation. We have accepted, with only muted complaints, Chinese censorship and blocking of content from abroad while allowing Chinese companies to explore and exploit whatever markets it likes. Few foreign companies are allowed to reach Chinese citizens with ideas or services, but the world is fully open to China's online companies. From China's perspective, the asymmetry has been a bonanza that has served economic as well as political goals. While China does have great engineers, European nations overrun by American tech companies must be jealous of the thriving tech industry that China has built in the absence of serious foreign competition (aided by the theft of trade secrets). At the same time, China has managed, to an extent many believed impossible, to use the internet to suppress any nascent political opposition and ceaselessly promote its ruling party. The idealists who thought the internet would automatically create democracy in China were wrong.

The website of Notepad++ is banned in China as of Monday, "obviously due to" its release of editions named "Free Uyghur" and "Stand with Hong Kong," the source code and text editor announced on Twitter. TechCrunch reports: First released in 2003 by France-based developer Don Ho, free-to-use Notepad++ operates on Windows and supports some 90 languages. In his release notices for the two editions, Ho openly voiced his concerns over "human rights" conditions, respectively in the Xinjiang autonomous region and Hong Kong. Tests by TechCrunch found that the Notepad++ ban only applies to its Download page -- which showcases the special editions and thus politically sensitive language -- when one tries to reach it from Chinese browsers developed by Tencent (QQ Browser and WeChat's built-in browser), Alibaba (UC Browser), 360 and Sogou. These services flag the page as containing content "prohibited" by local regulators.

Notepad++'s home page, on the other hand, remains unblocked through these local browsers. One can still access the full site from Chrome and DuckDuckGo in China. The ban began as early as August 12 when a user notified Ho of the ban, the developer told TechCrunch. He has never been contacted by any Chinese government authority and does not plan to take measures to cope with the website restriction.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Internet connectivity and cellular service in Belarus have been down since Sunday evening, after sporadic outages early that morning and throughout the day. The connectivity blackout, which also includes landline phones, appears to be a government-imposed outage that comes amid widespread protests and increasing social unrest over Belarus' presidential election Sunday. The ongoing shutdown has further roiled the country of about 9.5 million people, where official election results this morning indicated that five-term president Aleksandr Lukashenko had won a sixth term with about 80 percent of the vote. Around the country, protests against Lukashenko's administration, including criticisms of his foreign policy and handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, grew in the days leading up to the election and exploded on Sunday night. The government has responded to the protests by mobilizing police and military forces, particularly in Minsk, the capital. Meanwhile, opposition candidates and protesters say the election was rigged and believe the results to be illegitimate.

On Monday, Lukashenko said in an interview that the internet outages were coming from abroad, and were not the result of a Belarusian government initiative. Belarus' Community Emergency Response Team, or CERT, in a statement on Sunday blamed large distributed denial-of-service attacks, particularly against the country's State Security Committee and Ministry of Internal Affairs, for causing "problems with equipment." The Belarusian government-owned ISP RUE Beltelecom said in a statement Monday that it is working to resolve the outages and restore service after "multiple cyberattacks of varying intensity." Outside observers have met those claims with skepticism. "The truth of what's going on in Belarus isn't really knowable right now, but there's no indication of a DDoS attack. It can't be ruled out, but there's no external sign of it that we see," says Alp Toker, director of the nonpartisan connectivity tracking group NetBlocks. After midnight Sunday, NetBlocks observed an outage that went largely unnoticed by the Belarus population, given the hour, but the country's internet infrastructure became increasingly wobbly afterward. "Then just as polls are opening in the morning, there are more disruptions, and those really continue and progress," says Toker. "Then the major outage that NetBlocks detected started right as the polls were closing and is ongoing."

The disruption extended even to virtual private networks -- a common workaround for internet outages or censorship -- most of which remain unreachable. "Belarus hasn't had a lot of investment in circumvention technologies, because people there haven't needed to," Toker says. Meanwhile, there are a few anecdotal indications that the outages were planned, and even possibly that the government warned some businesses and institutions ahead of time. A prescient report on Saturday from the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets included an interview with a salesperson who warned journalists attempting to buy SIM cards that the government had indicated widespread connectivity outages might be coming as soon as that night.

China's Great Firewall "is now blocking HTTPS connections set up via the new TLS 1.3 encryption protocol and which use ESNI (Encrypted Server Name Indication)," reports ZDNet: The block has been in place for more than a week, according to a joint report authored by three organizations tracking Chinese censorship — iYouPort, the University of Maryland, and the Great Firewall Report. ZDNet also confirmed the report's findings with two additional sources — namely members of a U.S. telecommunications provider and an internet exchange point (IXP) — using instructions provided in a mailing list...

The reason for the ban is obvious for experts. HTTPS connections negotiated via TLS 1.3 and ESNI prevent third-party observers from detecting what website a user is attempting to access. This effectively blinds the Chinese government's Great Firewall surveillance tool from seeing what users are doing online.

There is a myth surrounding HTTPS connections that network observers (such as internet service providers) cannot see what users are doing. This is technically incorrect. While HTTPS connections are encrypted and prevent network observers from viewing/reading the contents of an HTTPS connection, there is a short period before HTTPS connections are established when third-parties can detect to what server the user is connecting. This is done by looking at the HTTPS connection's SNI (Server Name Indication) field.

In HTTPS connections negotiated via older versions of the TLS protocol (such as TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2), the SNI field is visible in plaintext.

The Trump administration said late Wednesday it was stepping up efforts to purge "untrusted" Chinese apps from US digital networks and called the Chinese-owned short-video app TikTok and messenger app WeChat "significant threats." From a report: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said expanded US efforts on a program it calls "Clean Network" would focus on five areas and include steps to prevent various Chinese apps, as well as Chinese telecoms companies, from accessing sensitive information on American citizens and businesses. Mr Pompeo's announcement comes after US President Donald Trump threatened to ban TikTok. The hugely popular video-sharing app has come under fire from US lawmakers and the administration over national security concerns, amid intensified tensions between Washington and Beijing.

"With parent companies based in China, apps like TikTok, WeChat and others are significant threats to personal data of American citizens, not to mention tools for CCP [Chinese Communist Party] content censorship," Mr Pompeo said. In an interview with state news agency Xinhua on Wednesday, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said the United States "has no right" to set up the "Clean Network" and calls the actions by Washington as "a textbook case of bullying." "Anyone can see through clearly that the intention of the US is to protect it's monopoly position in technology and to rob other countries of their proper right to development," said Mr Wang.

Apple has another antitrust charge on its plate. Messaging app Telegram has joined Spotify in filing a formal complaint against the iOS App Store in Europe -- adding its voice to a growing number of developers willing to publicly rail against what they decry as Apple's app "tax." From a report: A spokesperson for Telegram confirmed the complaint to TechCrunch, pointing us to this public Telegram post where founder, Pavel Durov, sets out seven reasons why he thinks iPhone users should be concerned about the company's behavior. These range from the contention that Apple's 30% fee on app developers leads to higher prices for iPhone users; to censorship concerns, given Apple controls what's allowed (and not allowed) on its store; to criticism of delays to app updates that flow from Apple's app review process; to the claim that the app store structure is inherently hostile to user privacy, given that Apple gets full visibility of which apps users are downloading and engaging with. This week Durov also published a blog post in which he takes aim at a number of "myths" he says Apple uses to try to justify the 30% app fee -- such as a claim that iOS faces plenty of competition for developers; or that developers can choose not to develop for iOS and instead only publish apps for Android.

In 100 days the U.S. will vote on whether Donald Trump, Joe Biden or somebody else should be America's president. But both candidates are also running political ads attacking social media — on social media.

"They're shooting the messenger while giving it lots of money," reports the Associated Press: Biden has focused on Facebook, with a #MoveFastFixIt campaign that admonishes Facebook for not doing enough to protect users from foreign meddling or being duped by falsehoods, particularly those spread by Trump about mail-in voting. His campaign just last month spent nearly $10,000 to run ads scolding the company on its own platform. "We could lie to you, but we won't," says one of Biden's ads.... Despite criticizing Facebook, Biden's campaign said it's still purchasing millions of dollars in Facebook ads because it's one of the few ways to counter Trump's false posts — since Facebook won't fact check him. The ads are also a cheap and effective way for the campaigns to rally supporters who are unhappy with the platforms, said Kathleen Searles, a Louisiana State University political communications professor. "We do know that anger can be very motivating — it motivates them to get their name on an email list, or donate $20," Searles said...

While Biden has focused on Facebook, Trump has honed in on Twitter, and occasionally Snapchat, with his campaign running online ads that accuse both companies of "interfering" in the election. Twitter became a Trump campaign target after the company rolled out its first fact check of his inaccurate tweet about voting in late May. Twitter has since applied similar labels to five other Trump tweets, including two that called mail-in ballots "fraudulent" and predicted that "mail boxes will be robbed" if voting doesn't take place in person... Republican leaders have since joined in railing against Twitter. This month, Rep. Jim Jordan, a firebrand conservative from Ohio, demanded Twitter hand over a full accounting, including emails, of how it decided to fact check the president...

Facebook could be next for a face-off with the president and his allies now that the company has vowed to label any posts — Trump's included — that violate its rules against voting misinformation or hate speech. Facebook has yet to take such action, though.

"Social media censorship is going to be a very potent campaign issue," Brooking said. "And there's going to be incentive from a number of folks running for office in 2020 to push the envelope still further, to try to invite more and more social media moderation because they see it as a potent political stunt."

transporter_ii shares a report from Politico: A federal appeals court has blocked a bid by one of President Donald Trump's appointees to take over a government-funded nonprofit organization that fosters technology aimed at undermining internet censorship around the globe. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an order Tuesday morning preventing U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO Michael Pack from installing a hand-picked board to replace the previously existing leadership of the Open Technology Fund. Weeks after his Senate confirmation last month, Pack purged leadership at a series of taxpayer-funded media outlets, including the storied Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia networks, as well as the lesser-known OTF.

Trump has taken the global broadcasters to task for being too critical of the administration and its policies, including its response to the coronavirus. Pack's drive to oust the leaders of the media outlets was seen as an effort to draw friendlier coverage. Veterans of the organizations have said the massive leadership change undermined their traditional independence. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell turned down a request by the existing members of the OTF board to block Pack's move against them. However, in the new appeals court order, the judges from the D.C. Circuit said Pack appeared to lack the same authority over the internet-focused nonprofit that he enjoys over the other federally funded international media organizations. "The government's actions have jeopardized OTF's relationships with its partner organizations, leading its partner organizations to fear for their safety," the D.C. Circuit order said. "Further, absent an injunction during the appellate process, OTF faces an increasing risk that its decision-making will be taken over by the government, that it will suffer reputational harm, and that it will lose the ability to effectively operate in light of the two dueling boards that presently exist." The appeals court order is temporary and does not amount to a final ruling on Pack's authority.

A federal appeals court has blocked a bid by one of President Donald Trump's appointees to take over a government-funded nonprofit organization that fosters technology aimed at undermining internet censorship around the globe. From a report, shared by reader transporter_ii: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an order Tuesday morning preventing U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO Michael Pack from installing a hand-picked board to replace the previously existing leadership of the Open Technology Fund. Weeks after his Senate confirmation last month, Pack purged leadership at a series of taxpayer-funded media outlets, including the storied Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia networks, as well as the lesser-known OTF. Trump has taken the global broadcasters to task for being too critical of the administration and its policies, including its response to the coronavirus. Pack's drive to oust the leaders of the media outlets was seen as an effort to draw friendlier coverage. Veterans of the organizations have said the massive leadership change undermined their traditional independence.

The recent retraction of a research paper which claimed to find no link between police killings and the race of the victims was a story tailor-made for today's fights over cancel culture. From a report: First, the authors asked for the paper to be withdrawn, both because they'd been "careless when describing the inferences that could be made from our data" and because of how others had interpreted the work. (In particular they pointed to recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with the headline, "The Myth of Systemic Police Racism.") Then, after two days of predictable blowback from those decrying what they saw as left-wing censorship, the authors tried to clarify: "People were incorrectly concluding that we retracted due to either political pressure or the political views of those citing the paper," they wrote in an amended statement. No, the authors said, the real reason they retracted the paper was because it contained a serious mistake. In fact, that mistake -- a misstatement of its central finding -- had been caught soon after the paper's initial publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2019, and was formally corrected in April of this year. At that point, the authors acknowledged their error -- sort of -- while insisting that their main conclusions held. That the eventual retraction came only after the paper became a flashpoint in the debate over race and policing in the wake of George Floyd's murder ... well, let's agree that the retraction happened.

[...] As we and others have written many times, peer review -- the way journals ask researchers to perform it, anyway -- is not designed to catch fraud. It's also vulnerable to rigging and doesn't go so well when done in haste. Editors and publishers tend to admit these problems only under duress -- i.e., when a well-publicized retraction happens -- and then hope that we believe their claims that such colossal blunders are somehow "the system is working the way it should." But their protestations only serve as an acknowledgement that the standard system doesn't work, and that we must instead rely upon the more informal sort of peer review that happens to a paper after it gets published. The internet has enabled such post-publication peer review, as it is known, to happen with more speed, on sites like PubPeer.com. In some cases, though -- as with the PNAS paper described above -- the resolution of this after-the-fact assessment comes much too late, after a mistaken claim has already made the rounds. So how might journals do things better? As Daniel Lakens, of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and his colleagues have argued, researchers should embrace a "Red Team challenge" approach to peer review. Just as software companies hire hackers to probe their products for potential gaps in the security, a journal might recruit a team of scientific devil's advocates: subject-matter specialists and methodologists who will look for "holes and errors in ongoing work and ... challenge dominant assumptions, with the goal of improving project quality," Lakens wrote in Nature recently. After all, he added, science is only as robust as the strongest critique it can handle.

Amid intense scrutiny over TikTok as a potential national security risk in the U.S., WeChat, the essential tool for Chinese people's day-to-day life, is also taking heat from Washington. TechCrunch reports: White House trade advisor Peter Navarro told Fox Business on Sunday that "[TikTok] and WeChat are the biggest forms of censorship on the Chinese mainland, and so expect strong action on that." Navarro alleged that "all of the data that goes into those mobile apps that kids have so much fun with and seem so convenient, it goes right to servers in China, right to the Chinese military, the Chinese communist party, and the agencies which want to steal our intellectual property."

It's unclear how the U.S. restriction will play out, if it will at all, though some WeChat users are already speculating workarounds to stay in touch with their family and friends back home. In the case that the Tencent-owned messenger is removed by Apple App Store or Google Play, U.S.-based users could switch to another regional store to download the app. If it were an IP address ban, they could potentially access the app through virtual private networks (VPNs), tools that are familiar to many in China to access online services blocked by Beijing's Great Firewall.

AmiMoJo quotes TechCrunch: TikTok announced that it would pull out of Hong Kong, which is facing an unprecedented wave of control from the Beijing government after the promulgation of the national security law. "In light of recent events, we've decided to stop operations of the TikTok app in Hong Kong," said a TikTok spokesperson. The company declined further comment on the decision...

ByteDance, founded by Chinese serial entrepreneur Zhang Yiming, has been working to disassociate TikTok from its Chinese ownership and Beijing censorship. Efforts have ranged from keeping an overseas data center for TikTok that's supposedly out of reach by the Chinese authority, giving outside experts a glimpse into its moderation process, through to hiringDisney's Kevin Mayer as the app's new global face.

UK universities are testing a new online teaching link for students in China -- which will require course materials to comply with Chinese restrictions on the internet. From a report: It enables students in China to keep studying UK degrees online, despite China's limits on internet access. But it means students can only reach material on an "allowed" list. Universities UK said it was "not aware of any instances when course content has been altered." And the universities' body rejected that this was accepting "censorship." A spokeswoman said the project would allow students in China to have better access to UK courses "while complying with local regulations." But in a separate essay published by the Higher Education Policy Institute, Professor Kerry Brown of King's College London cautioned of the risk of universities adopting "self-censorship" when engaging with China. MPs on the foreign affairs select committee have previously warned against universities avoiding "topics sensitive to China," such as pro-democracy protests or the treatment of Uighur Muslims. Chinese students have become an important source of revenue for UK universities, representing almost a quarter of all overseas students - and Queen's University Belfast is chartering a plane to bring students from China this autumn.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: [The Open Technology Fund is a U.S. government-funded nonprofit, which is part of the umbrella group called the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which also controls Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.] OTF's goal is to help oppressed communities across the globe by building the digital tools they need and offering training and support to use those tools. Its work has saved countless lives, and every single day millions of people use OTF-assisted tools to communicate and speak out without fear of arrest, retribution, or even death. The fund has helped dissidents raise their voices beyond China's advanced censorship network, known as the Great Firewall; helped citizens in Cuba to access news from sources other than the state-sanctioned media; and supported independent journalists in Russia so they could work without fear of a backlash from the Kremlin. Closer to home, the tools that OTF has funded, including the encrypted messaging app Signal, have allowed Black Lives Matter protesters to organize demonstrations across the country more securely.

But now all of that is under threat, after Michael Pack, a Trump appointee and close ally of Steve Bannon, took control of USAGM in June. Pack has ousted the OTF's leadership, removed its bipartisan board, and replaced it with Trump loyalists, including Bethany Kozma, an anti-transgender activist. One reason the OTF managed to gain the trust of technologists and activists around the world is because, as its name suggests, it invested largely in open-source technology. By definition, open-source software's source code is publicly available, meaning it can be studied, vetted, and in many cases contributed to by anyone in the world. This transparency makes it possible for experts to study code to see if it has, for example, backdoors or vulnerabilities that would allow for governments to compromise the software's security, potentially putting users at risk of being surveilled or identified. Now, groups linked to Pack and Bannon have been pressing for the funding of closed-source technology, which is antithetical to the OTF's work over the last eight years. Pack is being pressed to fund Freegate and Ultrasurf, "two little-known apps that allow users to circumvent internet censorship in repressive regimes but currently have very small user bases inside China," reports Vice. "These apps are not widely trusted by internet freedom experts and activists, according to six experts who spoke to VICE News. That the OTF would pivot its funding from trusted, open-source tech to more obscure, closed-source tech has alarmed activists around the world and has resulted in open revolt among OTF's former leadership."

More than half a dozen experts who spoke to VICE News "said the apps' code is out of date, dangerously vulnerable to compromise, and lacks the user base to allow it to effectively scale even if they secured government funding."

The social network bills itself as a 'no censorship' bastion -- but it's already had to remind users what is and isn't allowed. From a report: In recent weeks, Donald Trump has started having his tweets factchecked and published with disclaimers when they contain misleading information. Katie Hopkins, the woman who once compared migrants to cockroaches and called for a "final solution" in relation to Muslims, has been banned from Twitter. And a subreddit called r/The_Donald has been banned after Reddit updated its hate speech guidelines -- Reddit said in a statement that "mocking people with physical disabilities" and "describing a racial minority as sub-human and inferior to the racial majority" will not be allowed. And so, naturally, people are asking where on earth they are supposed to go to get their daily dose of "free speech." Enter Parler, the new, supposedly unbiased free-speech social network that suggests, when you join, you follow people such as Rand Paul, Hopkins and Rudy Giuliani. Other rightwing politicians such as Ted Cruz and Devin Nunes are on it. So too are the much-overlooked members of the Trump family Eric and Lara, commentators such as Candace Owens, and Donald Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale.

A glance at Parler might lead you to think that the platform is just a benign, more boring version of Twitter. Megyn Kelly is on Parler telling you she doesn't like Mary Trump's new book; Eric Trump is posting boring statements such as "Another great day for the market (amazing how the media and left have been very quiet about this incredible recovery)" -- which reminds you of why Don Jr is the more popular brother; the Daily Caller is retweeting (re-parlering?) a bunch of articles that look like they belong on the Onion. But since the platform's selling point is that it provides a safe space for people who want to use hate speech, the ugliness is there if you want to find it: Hopkins is equating Black Lives Matter protests with "thuggery" and posting comments such as "Our white girls pay the price. Every time" in a post about illegal immigration in Scotland.

Andrew Torba -- who tried to make his own alternative free-speech network for those exiled from Twitter -- has called it a magnet for "Z-list Maga celebrities." His website, Gab, quickly became popular with extremists including antisemites and neo-Nazis -- including the Pittsburgh synagogue suspect Robert Bowers, who announced his intentions for mass murder on the platform. Torba's experience shows that regulating free speech on a platform that allows hate speech to run rampant is rife with its own challenges. After the attack in Pittsburgh, Gab was forced offline for a brief period after being dropped by its server, GoDaddy, who said that encouraging violence was in breach of its terms of service.

schwit1 shares a report: Free press advocates have created a virtual library in Minecraft that bypasses censorship in oppressive countries to house censored journals and articles. The virtual space was created as a collaboration between the freedom-of-the-press organization, Reporters Without Borders, and a Minecraft design company, BlockWorks. Because Minecraft isn't blocked in many places -- at least, not yet -- it's an ingenious way to ensure access even for those living under repressive regimes. The Uncensored Library, as it's called, houses information on all 180 countries in the press freedom index, as well as exhibition halls on countries notorious for their press censorship, like Russia and Vietnam. BlockWorks says that journalists across five countries who've seen their works banned were able to republish their articles in the exhibition halls for their respective countries, giving them a chance to inform the world about the situation on the ground. There are also areas in the exhibition halls honoring journalists who have been silenced, including Nguyen Van Dai, Yulia Beerezovskaia, and Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was brutally murdered, allegedly at the behest of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince, Mohammad Bin Salman.

According to a recently published research paper [PDF] co-authored by researchers from Drexel, NYU, and the University of Washington, Tor users make high-quality contributions to Wikipedia. And, when they are blocked, as doctoral candidate Chau Tran, the lead author describes, "the collateral damage in the form of unrealized valuable contributions from anonymity seekers is invisible." From a blog post: The authors of the paper include Chau Tran (NYU), Kaylea Champion (UW & CDSC), Andrea Forte (Drexel), Benjamin Mako Hill (UW & CDSC), and Rachel Greenstadt (NYU). The paper was published at the 2020 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy between May 18 and 20. By examining more than 11,000 Wikipedia edits made by Tor users able to bypass Wikipedia's Tor ban between 2007 and 2018, the research team found that Tor users made similar quality edits to those of IP editors, who are non-logged-in users identified by their IP addresses, and first-time editors. The paper notes that Tor users, on average, contributed higher-quality changes to articles than non-logged-in IP editors.

The study also finds that Tor-based editors are more likely than other users to focus on topics that may be considered controversial, such as politics, technology, and religion. Related research implies Tor users are quite similar to other internet users, and Tor users frequently visit websites in the Alexa top one million. The new study findings make clear how anonymous users are raising the bar on community discussions and how valuable anonymity is to avoid self-censorship. Anonymity and privacy can help protect users from consequences that may prevent them from interacting with the Wikipedia community.

The state of California has lost again in its attempt to punish IMDb for ageism perpetrated by movie studios who seem to refuse to cast actresses above a certain age in choice roles. Techdirt reports: The law passed by the California legislature does one thing: prevents IMDb (and other sites, theoretically) from publishing facts about actors: namely, their ages. This stupid law was ushered into existence by none other than the Screen Actors Guild, capitalizing on a (failed) lawsuit brought against the website by an actress who claimed the publication of her real age cost her millions in Hollywood paychecks. These beneficiaries of the First Amendment decided there was just too much First Amendment in California. To protect actors from studio execs, SAG decided to go after a third-party site respected for its collection of factual information about movies, actors, and everything else film-related.

The federal court handling IMDb's lawsuit against the state made quick work of the state's arguments in favor of very selective censorship. In only six pages, the court destroyed the rationale offered by the government's finest legal minds. [...] Even if the law had somehow survived a First Amendment challenge, it still wouldn't have prevented studios from engaging in discriminatory hiring practices. If this was really the state's concerns, it would have stepped up its regulation of the entertainment industry, rather than a single site that was unsuccessfully sued by an actress, who speculated IMDb's publication of her age was the reason she wasn't landing the roles she wanted.

Vietnam has reported no coronavirus deaths — and, for more than two months, no local infections (with a total for this year of just 349) — despite having a population of 97 million and a border shared with China. VOA News takes a closer look: It is hard for outsiders to verify official data, though health experts say Vietnam headed off a full-blown calamity because of its drastic and early action. The government was hyper-aware of the threat to hospital and quarantine capacity... Vietnam saw the disease as a threat early on, treating its first patient in January and proceeding to contact trace and restrict movement. Timing was critical because of the virus' ability to spread exponentially. The Ho Chi Minh City government said, for instance, that for every 300 people infected, 84,000 people had to quarantine. It is likely that Vietnam did not have to cover up mass infections and deaths because it acted before the virus could reach that point...

In addition to national coordination, targeted testing and isolation, Vietnam can decree measures regardless of public debate, like tapping a national security network to monitor the physical and virtual space... On one hand, Vietnam used fines and takedown orders to curb the spread of false information about the virus, as have other nations. On the other hand, the controls continue a history of censorship of information that the Southeast Asian government considers unfavorable.

Social media allowed some false information to spread in Vietnam, but also greatly heightened people's awareness of the virus and what they should do, concluded a study by 11 authors published in April in Sustainability, a science journal. Vietnam's success, they said, came from "mobilizing citizens' awareness of disease prevention without spreading panic, via fostering genuine cooperation between government, civil society and private individuals."
Some examples from the article:

• Standing vice chairman of the People's Committee, Le Thanh Liem, urged local authorities and other relevant agencies to visit every house to find out if anyone had come from other countries since March 8 and test and quarantine anyone at risk at home or quarantine areas.

• Those entering a cafe have a good chance of meeting a security guard who sprays their hands with disinfectant.

• If getting on a bus, they will be told to put on a mask and sit one row apart from others.

Two major outdoor-goods retailers "have joined a boycott of Facebook after six civil rights groups called on businesses to stop advertising on Facebook in July," reports CNET, "to push the social network to do more to combat hate speech and misinformation..." The moves by the high-profile brands [North Face and REI] suggest the ad boycott, unveiled Wednesday, is beginning to gain traction. In addition to the two retailers, digital-advertising firm 360i urged its clients in an email to stop purchasing ads on Facebook in July, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Colors of Change, Free Press and Common Sense say that boycotting advertising on Facebook will put pressure on the platform to use its $70 billion in annual advertising revenue to support people who are targets of racism and hate and to increase safety for private groups on the site.

"We have long seen how Facebook has allowed some of the worst elements of society into our homes and our lives. When this hate spreads online it causes tremendous harm and also becomes permissible offline," Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a press release announcing the campaign. "Our organizations have tried individually and collectively to push Facebook to make their platforms safer, but they have repeatedly failed to take meaningful action. We hope this campaign finally shows Facebook how much their users and their advertisers want them to make serious changes for the better."

In a press call Wednesday, Facebook Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications Nick Clegg said the company doesn't allow hate speech on its platform. Facebook removed nearly 10 million posts for violating its rules against hate speech in the last quarter, he said, and most were taken down before users reported them. The social network relies on a mix of human reviewers and technology to moderate content, but detecting hate speech can be challenging because machines have to understand the cultural context of words.

"Of course, we would like to do even better than that," Clegg said. "We need to do more. We need to move faster, but we are making significant progress."
Among the groups' demands: removing all ads that contain hate speech -- or misinformation.