Google's internet freedom moonshot has gotten glowing attention for its ambitious projects. But current and former employees, leaked documents, and internal messages reveal a grim reality. From a report: It's an organization that over the years has earned a seemingly endless run of glowing press coverage: Jigsaw has been called the "internet justice league," an "elite think tank," and a team that is "fighting the darkest parts of the internet." While trying to save the internet from censorship, extremists, and hackers may sound like one of the best jobs in tech, more than a dozen current and former employees of Jigsaw told Motherboard that the reality inside Google's moonshot is bleak. [...]

Current and former Jigsaw employees describe a toxic workplace environment, mismanagement, poor leadership, HR complaints that haven't resulted in action, retaliation against employees who speak up, and a chronic failure to retain talent, particularly women engineers and researchers. Sources describe a place full of well-intentioned people who are undermined by their own leaders; an organization that, despite the breathless headlines it has garnered, has done little to actually make the internet any better. Jigsaw's internal problems are driving away employees. Since mid-2018, a total of roughly two dozen Jigsaw employees have left, according to sources on the team. As of this week, Jigsaw has about 60 employees, according to a current employee.

Psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson announced a subscription-based free speech platform called 'Thinkspot' on Wednesday that promises to provide users the best features of other social media platforms, but without censorship. From a report: It's being marketed as a free speech alternative to payment processors like Patreon in that it will "monetize creators" and as provide a social media alternative to platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Peterson discussed Thinkspot with podcaster Joe Rogan on June 9, emphasizing a radically pro-free speech Terms of Service. He described that freedom as the "central" aspect saying, "once you're on our platform we won't take you down unless we're ordered to by a US court of law."

When you type in a URL to your browser and press "enter," your browser sends that name to a network of computers called the Domain Name System (DNS), which converts it into IP addresses. These numbers are what allow your browser to find the right server on the internet and connect to it. When you navigate to a website, you are trusting a handful of organizations that have been charged with keeping the DNS working and secure.

"To people like Steven McKie, a developer for and investor in an open-source project called the Handshake Network, this centralized power over internet naming makes the internet vulnerable to both censorship and cyberattacks," reports MIT technology review. "Handshake wants to decentralize it by creating an alternative naming system that nobody controls. In doing so, it could help protect us from hackers trying to exploit the DNS's security weaknesses, and from governments hoping to use it to block free expression." From the report: The system would be based on blockchain technology, meaning it would be software that runs on a widely distributed network of computers. In theory, it would have no single point of failure and depend on no human-run organization that could be corrupted or co-opted. Handshake's software is a heavily modified version ("fork") of Bitcoin, and just as Bitcoin's network of miners protects the cryptocurrency from manipulation and makes it virtually impossible for authorities to shut down, a similar network could keep a permanent, censorship-resistant record of internet names. The Handshake team is far from the first to try to create a decentralized naming system for the web. But unlike previous efforts, Handshake isn't trying to replace DNS but work with it.

Besides ICANN, there's yet another class of organization whose job Handshake aims to decentralize. See that little padlock icon in your browser bar, to the left of the domain name? That means your computer has verified that your connection to this website is encrypted and that the site is authentic, not a fake one designed by a criminal trying to steal your login credentials. It does that by checking the veracity of a string of numbers called the site's digital certificate, issued by one of a number of so-called certificate authorities. These entities, many of which are for-profit companies, are crucial to internet security. They can also get hacked. And if one gets breached, and an attacker can start issuing fake certificates, it undermines the security of the whole internet. But if website names are managed on a tamper-resistant blockchain, then you don't need certificate authorities; the naming system itself can provide the guarantee that the site you're connected to is real. That's what Handshake aims to do.

Horst Seehofer, Germany's federal interior minister, wants to require encryption companies to provide the government with plain text transcripts. One security expert says Facebook is already working on a way to make it happen.

An anonymous reader quotes his remarks in Forbes: The reality is that at its annual conference earlier this month, Facebook previewed all of the necessary infrastructure to make Germany's vision a reality and even alluded to the very issue of how Facebook's own business needs present it with the need to be able to covertly access content directly from users' devices that have been protected through end-to-end encryption...

While it was little noticed at the time, Facebook's presentation on its work towards moving AI-powered content moderation from its data centers directly onto users' phones presents a perfect blueprint for Seehofer's vision. Touting the importance of edge content moderation, Facebook specifically cited the need to be able to scan the unencrypted contents of users' messages in an end-to-end encrypted environment to prevent them from being able to share content that deviated from Facebook's acceptable speech guidelines. This would actually allow a government like Germany to proactively prevent unauthorized speech before it is ever uttered, by using court orders to force Facebook to expand its censorship list for German users of its platform.

Even more worryingly, Facebook's presentation alluded to the company's need to covertly harvest unencrypted illicit messages from users' devices without their knowledge and before the content has been encrypted or after it has been decrypted, using the client application itself to access the encrypted-in-transit content. While it stopped short of saying it was actively building such a backdoor, the company noted that when edge content moderation flagged a post in an end-to-end encrypted conversation as a violation, the company needed to be able to access the unencrypted contents to further train its algorithms, which would likely require transmitting an unencrypted copy from the user's device directly to Facebook without their approval.

Could this be the solution Germany has been searching for?
The article warns that by "sparking the idea of being able to silently harvest those decrypted conversations on the client side, Facebook is inadvertently telegraphing to anti-encryption governments that there are ways to bypass encryption while also bypassing the encryption debate."

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," said Internet pioneer John Gilmore in a 1993 Time magazine article about a then-ungoverned place called "cyberspace." How times have changed. From a report: In April, Sri Lankan authorities blocked its citizens' access to social media sites like Facebook and YouTube following a major terrorist attack. Such censorship, once considered all but inconceivable, is now commonplace in a growing number of countries. Russia, for instance, approved an "Internet sovereignty" law in May that gives the government broad power to dictate what its citizens can see online. And China is not just perfecting its "Great Firewall," which blocks such things as searches for "Tiananmen Square" and the New York Times, but is seeking to export its top-down version of the web to countries throughout Southeast Asia.

This phenomenon, colloquially called "splinternet," whereby governments seek to fence off the World Wide Web into a series of national Internets, isn't new. The term, also known as cyberbalkanization, has been around since the 1990s. But lately the rupturing has accelerated, as companies censor their sites to comply with national rules and governments blot out some sites entirely. "It feels like a chunk of the Internet is gone or different. People feel the Internet is not as we knew it," says Venkat Balasubramani, who runs a cyber law firm in Seattle. Technology is one reason for the change. According to Danny O'Brien of the digital civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, the sort of censorship tools deployed by China were enormously expensive and labor-Âintensive. But now, as the tools become cheaper and more efficient, other countries are willing to try them too. Meanwhile, there is a new political will among governments to try to control websites -- especially following events like the Arab Spring, during which Facebook and Twitter helped fuel political uprisings.

The Tor Project today made the first stable version of its privacy-focused browser available on the Google Play Store. From a report: This new mobile browser integrates the Tor protocol stack into a standalone browser and replaces Orfox as the main way to navigate the Tor network from an Android device. Tor Project developers have been working on this browser for eight months now, since September 2018, when they first released an alpha version for public testing. "We made it a priority to reach the rising number of users who only browse the web with a mobile device," said Isabela Bagueros, Executive Director of the Tor Project. "These users often face heavy surveillance and censorship online, so it is critical for us to reach them. We made sure there are no proxy bypasses, that first-party isolation is enabled to protect you from cross-site tracking, and that most of the fingerprinting defenses are working," the Tor team added.

China is known for its censorship of certain websites. The country went the extra mile by blocking Wikipedia in April. From a report: Multiple reports confirm China blocked Wikipedia across all language URLs sometime in late April. The country is using DNS injections to prevent its citizens from accessing the online encyclopedia, according to a report from the Open Observatory of Network Interference on May 4.

Despite the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation, "censorship cannot be the only answer," argues the EFF, adding that "removing entire categories of speech from a platform does little to solve the underlying problems."

"Tech companies and online platforms have other ways to address the rapid spread of disinformation, including addressing the algorithmic 'megaphone' at the heart of the problem and giving users control over their own feeds... " Anti-vax information is able to thrive online in part because it exists in a data void in which available information about vaccines online is "limited, non-existent, or deeply problematic." Because the merit of vaccines has long been considered a decided issue, there is little recent scientific literature or educational material to take on the current mountains of disinformation. Thus, someone searching for recent literature on vaccines will likely find more anti-vax content than empirical medical research supporting vaccines. Censoring anti-vax disinformation won't address this problem.

Even attempts at the impossible task of wiping anti-vax disinformation from the Internet entirely will put it beyond the reach of researchers, public health professionals, and others who need to be able to study it and understand how it spreads. In a worst-case scenario, well-intentioned bans on anti-vax content could actually make this problem worse. Facebook, for example, has over-adjusted in the past to the detriment of legitimate educational health content...

Platforms must address one of the root causes behind disinformation's spread online: the algorithms that decide what content users see and when. And they should start by empowering users with more individualized tools that let them understand and control the information they see.... Users shouldn't be held hostage to a platform's proprietary algorithm. Instead of serving everyone "one algorithm to rule them all" and giving users just a few opportunities to tweak it, platforms should open up their APIs to allow users to create their own filtering rules for their own algorithms. News outlets, educational institutions, community groups, and individuals should all be able to create their own feeds, allowing users to choose who they trust to curate their information and share their preferences with their communities.

New submitter scullyitsaliens writes: The Reddit clone Voat has reportedly been contacted by a "US agency" about threats being made on the censorship-free website, according to its founder Justin Chastain. In a post on Wednesday, Chastain (who goes by PuttItOut on Voat) told users they need to "chill on the 'threats,'" as the platform had been officially approached by an unnamed agency over some of its content. Chastain said he didn't want to litigate free speech, but that Voat would cooperate with law enforcement and remove "gray area" posts if asked. Voat users took offense to the perceived curtailing of their ability to post racial slurs and endorse violence.

The GitHub repository at "996.ICU" in China has been calling out tech companies in the country that pressure their employees to work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days per week. "Since it went up last month, the page has been starred over 229,000 times, making it one of the most popular GitHub repositories on the site," reports PC Magazine. "But now a group of Microsoft employees are worried the Chinese government will force their employer to take the page down. So in response, they've been circulating an internal letter, urging Microsoft to stand up to any potential pressure to censor the GitHub page." From the report: "We encourage Microsoft and GitHub, companies which firmly believe in a healthy work-life balance, to keep the 996.ICU GitHub repository uncensored and available to everyone," reads the letter, which was shared with PCMag and started circulating internally on Sunday.

The GitHub repository now hosts a list of over 140 Chinese companies that allegedly demand their employees work 60 hours a week. Many foreign media outlets have also reported on the protest page. But reportedly, some attempts have been made to censor mention of the 996.ICU repository within China. Domestic browsers from Tencent, Qihoo 360, and Xiaomi recently prevented users from visiting the GitHub page, according to Abacus. It's why a group of Microsoft employees based largely in the U.S. decided to circulate a protest letter calling on Redmond to protect the GitHub page from censorship. Microsoft hasn't commented, but the company's two other web properties, Bing and LinkedIn, "have been forced to comply with the country's strict censorship demands," the report notes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Russia's lower chamber of parliament has adopted a bill that would expand government control over the internet, raising fears of widespread censorship. The State Duma on Tuesday overwhelmingly voted to support the bill, which still has to be approved by the upper chamber of Russian Parliament and signed into the law by the president.

The bill requires internet providers to install equipment to route Russian internet traffic through servers in the country. That would increase the power of state agencies to control information while users would find it harder to circumvent government restrictions, and the quality of the connection may suffer. Proponents of the bill say it is a defense measure in case the United States or other hostile powers cut off the internet for Russia.

American entertainment giant Starz is continuing to remove tweets that link to a TorrentFreak news report about leaked TV-shows. From a report: Last week we posted a news article documenting how several TV-show episodes had leaked online before their official release. Due to the leaks, complete seasons of unreleased TV-shows such as "The Spanish Princess," "Ramy," and "The Red Line," surfaced on pirate sites. In most cases, there were visible signs revealing that the leaks were sourced from promotional screeners. The leaks also hit Starz, as three then-unreleased episodes from its TV series "American Gods" appeared online as well. The American entertainment company was obviously not happy with that, but its response was rather unconventional.

Soon after the news was published, Starz issued a takedown request through The Social Element Agency, requesting Twitter to remove our tweet to our own article. Twitter was quick to comply and removed the tweet that supposedly infringed Starz copyrights. We disagreed. The article in question never linked to any infringing material. It did include a screenshot from a leaked episode, showing the screener watermarks, but those watermarks were central to the story, as we explained in a follow-up piece. The good news is that many legal scholars, journalists, and lawyers agree with our stance. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for example, responded that Starz has no right to silence TorrentFreak and also shared that opinion on Twitter, where many others chimed in as well. That's when things started to spiral out of control. Starz takedown efforts only encouraged more people to share the original story about the leaks, which is a classic example of the 'Streisand Effect'. However, Starz didn't budge and issued takedown notices against those tweets as well.

"Winter is coming for fans of the hit television series Game of Thrones, with the final season set to hit screens around the world after a near two-year hiatus," reports the South China Morning Post. There were 96 million views for a discussion about the show on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo.

"But those watching inside China are also bracing for the chill of censorship." In recent years, Chinese authorities have ramped up the pressure on the television and film industries to clean up content they deem vulgar or politically incorrect. This has led to some serious censorship of foreign productions. Recent examples include the removal of scenes of smashed heads and bare flesh from the American superhero film Logan, and the apparent manipulation of a scene in Oscar-winner The Shape of Water so that a naked woman is made to appear to be wearing clothes...

In a bid to get around the censorship, many Chinese Game of Thrones fans have turned to virtual private networks and torrent download websites to access unexpurgated versions of their favourite episodes.
Tencent Video holds the exclusive distribution rights for the show in China, leaving one Weibo user to post "I'm begging Father Tencent not to censor too much, thank you."

Another added "This censored version is not interesting. I would pay money to watch the uncut version."

Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: We've been trying to explain for the past few months just how absolutely insane the new EU Terrorist Content Regulation will be for the internet. Among many other bad provisions, the big one is that it would require content removal within one hour as long as any "competent authority" within the EU sends a notice of content being designated as "terrorist" content. The law is set for a vote in the EU Parliament just next week. And as if they were attempting to show just how absolutely insane the law would be for the internet, multiple European agencies (we can debate if they're "competent") decided to send over 500 totally bogus takedown demands to the Internet Archive last week, claiming it was hosting terrorist propaganda content. [...] And just in case you think that maybe the requests are somehow legit, they are so obviously bogus that anyone with a browser would know they are bogus. Included in the list of takedown demands are a bunch of the Archive's "collection pages" including the entire Project Gutenberg page of public domain texts, it's collection of over 15 million freely downloadable texts, the famed Prelinger Archive of public domain films and the Archive's massive Grateful Dead collection. Oh yeah, also a page of CSPAN recordings. So much terrorist content!

Microsoft has been working with a Chinese military-run university on AI research that could be used for surveillance and censorship. From a report: Three papers, published between March and November last year, were co-written by academics at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing and researchers with affiliations to China's National University of Defense Technology (NUDR), which is controlled by China's top military body, the Central Military Commission. Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at the New America think-tank and a China tech policy expert, said the papers raised "red flags because of the nature of the technology, the author affiliations, combined with what we know about how this technology is being deployed in China right now." "The [Chinese]government is using these technologies to build surveillance systems and to detain minorities [in Xinjiang]," she added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Chinese journalists and netizens recently found that Apple Music's Chinese streaming service censored a song by Hong Kong singer Jacky Cheung that references the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, an extremely politically sensitive topic for the Chinese Communist Party. The incident's 30th anniversary is coming up in June. Sophie Richardson, the China Director at Human Rights Watch, called the reported move "spectacularly craven." The Tiananmen protests are emblematic of a larger pro-democracy movement in China that was snuffed out by the Beijing government. Thousands of protesters were killed, but the exact numbers have themselves been censored by Chinese government officials.

Apple Music has also reportedly censored Anthony Wong and Denise Ho, two pro-democracy singers. After being noticed by Chinese netizens, the removals were reported by the Hong Kong Free Press and The Stand, two Hong Kong-based news outlets. Taiwan News also reported the censorship of Cheung's "Ren Jian Dao." The music remains available on Apple Music's North American products. "By removing a song referring the Tiananmen Massacre, @apple is actively participating in the Chinese Communist Party's agenda of scrubbing the colossal violations it has committed against the Chinese people from collective memory and rewriting history," tweeted Yaqiu Wang, a Chinese researcher with Human Rights Watch.

Tuesday's hearing was meant to examine the rise of white nationalism and white supremacy and the role social media plays in its spread. Then the comments got hijacked. From a report: YouTube moderators disabled comments on livestreams of the House Judiciary Committee's hearing about hate crimes the rise of white nationalism on Tuesday, deeming them too hateful for the platform. The comment sections quickly flooded with hate speech and white nationalist memes before the hearing had even started. The comments included derogatory remarks about women on camera, anti-Semitic slurs, far-right memes with references to "white genocide," and pro-Trump slogans. The channels' comments sections were deactivated within an hour. [...] YouTube's disabling of comments is ironic: House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York, made special reference in his opening statement of the role social media platforms play in spreading hate speech and extremism in his opening statement.

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: As YouTube battles misinformation catastrophes and discovers new ways people are abusing its system, the company is shifting toward more commercial, advertiser-friendly content at a speed its creator community hasn't seen before. The golden age of YouTube -- the YouTube of a million different creators all making enough money to support themselves by creating videos about doing what they love -- is over... By the end of 2016, when algorithm changes were creating headaches for some of the platform's biggest creators, people started announcing they had to take a break from the site they called home. YouTube wasn't what it was between 2011 and 2016... YouTube was exerting more control over what users saw and what videos would make money...

YouTube faced an escalating crisis of radicalization and sweeping conspiracy theories that had been ignored by executives for years. The company's first small efforts to address these serious issues -- promoting content from musicians, late-night shows, and recommending fewer independent creators -- would have huge secondary effects on the middle-tier creators who had once been the heart of the platform during its golden period. It pushed YouTube toward the exact same Hollywood content to which it had once been an alternative.... Even people outside of YouTube saw what was happening. "YouTube is inevitably heading towards being like television, but they never told their creators this," Jamie Cohen, a professor of new media at Molloy College, told USA Today in 2018....

Individual YouTube creators couldn't keep up with the pace YouTube's algorithm set. But traditional, mainstream outlets could: late-night shows began to dominate YouTube, along with music videos from major labels. The platform now looked the way it had when it started, but with the stamp of Hollywood approval.
It's a contrast from the earliest days of YouTube, the article argues. Rather than user-generated content, "it was something else that helped the site explode in popularity: piracy." But their pivot to user-generated content apparently slowed with what YouTube creators call the "adpocalypse" -- YouTube's aggressive demonetization of "problematic" videos. (A handful of creators had been making more than a million dollars a month, and some even quit their jobs to focus on making videos full-time.)

To be fair, by 2017 YouTube had a problem. Every minute users uploaded 27,000 minutes of new footage, making it difficult to pre-screen. But after adjusting their algorithm, "perceived, secretive changes instilled creators with a distrust of the platform."

The old YouTube "seemed to welcome the wonderfully weird, innovative, and earnest, instead of turning them away in favor of late-night show clips and music videos," writes the Verge. But the new YouTube is different, say two brothers who used CGI to re-create Mortal Kombat's most gruesome kills on their RackaRacka channel. They say the new YouTube now buries their videos for "excessive violence."

Facebook, Google and Twitter are headed back to Washington next week to testify at a congressional hearing about alleged tech censorship. From a report: Tech companies have faced accusations that they're censoring conservative speech on their platforms. The companies have denied the allegations in the past. The hearing before the Senate Judiciary's subcommittee on the Constitution is scheduled for April 10 and is titled "Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse." A Facebook spokesperson said Neil Potts, its public policy director, will be testifying. Twitter and Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. A source familiar with the Senate hearing said Twitter and Google officials will also be attending. The hearing will likely mark Potts' second congressional appearance next week. Facebook and Google officials are expected to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on April 9 to answer questions about the spread of white nationalism on their platforms.

"Mark Zuckerberg says regulators and governments should play a more active role in controlling internet content," according to the BBC, calling for new laws governing harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Facebook's chief says the responsibility for monitoring harmful content is too great for firms alone... "Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree," Mr Zuckerberg writes... In brief, Mr Zuckerberg calls for the following things:

- Common rules that all social media sites need to adhere to, enforced by third-party bodies, to control the spread of harmful content

- All major tech companies to release a transparency report every three months, to put it on a par with financial reporting

- Stronger laws around the world to protect the integrity of elections, with common standards for all websites to identify political actors

- Laws that not only apply to candidates and elections, but also other "divisive political issues", and for laws to apply outside of official campaign periods

- New industry-wide standards to control how political campaigns use data to target voters online

- More countries to adopt privacy laws like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force last year

- A "common global framework" that means these laws are all standardised globally, rather than being substantially different from country to country

- Clear rules about who's responsible for protecting people's data when they move it from one service to another
Zuckerberg believes the same regulations should apply to all web sites to make it easier to stop the spread of "harmful content." He also says Facebook will be creating "an independent body so people can appeal our decisions" when content is taken.