censorship

Following up on the "Perspective" hate speech filtering experiment from 2017, one Alphabet's subsidiaries, Jigsaw, recently released a machine learning-powered tool designed to filter out "toxic" comments on high traffic sites. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the extension in a fresh Chrome...

Following protests from externals sources as well as their own employees, Google allegedly shelved their plans to launch the censored "Dragonfly" search engine in China last year. But, according to a recent report, Google employees have discovered that work on Dragonfly is ongoing. Inside...

NPR reports that Microsoft's search engine, Bing, appears to be blocked in China. Until Wednesday, Bing was one of the few foreign search engines that still worked inside the country, but NPR's Rob Schmitz confirmed that the site is no longer accessible, while noting that "China's internet...

Following a total freeze on video game approvals earlier this year, Reuters reports that the Chinese government approved 80 online games over the weekend. While this is great news for the gaming industry in general, the report notes that none of the games from Tencent Holdings are on the list...

The Intercept initially broke the report claiming that Google was working on a censored Chinese search engine with the code name "Dragonfly," and now, the publication claims that work on the project has "effectively ended." The report says that the Dragonfly team mined data from the Chinese site...

The EFF and other groups have lambasted the latest FCC vote to keep text messaging classified as "information services" as another measure that elevates the power of corporations over the rights of consumers. The EFF notes that wireless providers such as Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint have already...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has told a U.S. congressional panel Tuesday that it has no plans to relaunch its search engine in China. "But he added that internally Google has 'developed and looked at what search could look like. We've had the project underway for a while. At one point, we've had...

Citing a Reddit thread, PCGamesN reports that popular games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Paladins, Fortnite, and H1Z1 have been been banned in China, while others like World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo and League of Legends require "corrective action." According to the Reddit post, the...

Ubisoft has announced the creation of a global Rainbow Six Siege game that will fit meet regulations and compliance in certain Asian territories. This is being done to streamline the development process. Supposedly everything that will be censored is purely cosmetic. Some items that will be...

Twitch has been blocked in China after Chinese citizens flocked to the free streaming service to watch the Asian Games. Due to state broadcaster CCTV's complete lack of coverage of the event, Twitch became the third most popular app in the iOS App Store in China. Even though Chinese esports...

Valve is still progressing on a Steam overhaul that protects users from seeing content that they aren't interested in. This was born from concern about mature games being available on the platform. Users will be able to ignore up to 10 types of content including developers and publishers, game...

Google has booted the anti-censorship tool Ahoy! from the Chrome Store and no reason was given. This was a popular tool in Portugal because it allowed people there to navigate to government banned websites. The tool is open source so they have nothing to hide. According to the developer they...

Since the end of WW II displays of Nazi symbols have been banned. This ban also included use of these symbols in video games and as a result developers had to release censored video games. However, it looks like the practice may be ending because the German national ratings agency announced...

Saudi Arabia has issued a list of 47 banned video games after two children committed suicide. The children aged 12 and 13 were participating in a social media challenge called the "Blue Whale." The Blue Whale Challenge consists of 50 levels of challenges with each new tier becoming more...

Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey took to his platform today to admit that in its current implementation, Twitter has problems, and he is asking for help to fix it. CNBC is reporting that Dorsey said "We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and...

Twitter has released a blog post outlining it's results from their "Safety Work." Ed Ho, the General Manager for Consumer Product and Engineering informs us that they are "taking action on 10x the number of abusive accounts every day compared to the same time last year." And limiting or...

Countries around the world are passing laws regarding social media and search results. The growing issue is several of these country-specific laws are written so they must be enforced globally. Vivek Krishnamurthy, assistant director of Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, goes into great...

Ad revenue generated for videos on the Youtube service has shrunk by 99.5% for many channels when major brands pulled their advertising earlier this year. This was due to the ads being run on a few videos promoting terrorism and extremism. Youtube was told to tighten the reins on the type of...