Writing on CNN, an American historian looks at the Supreme Court's recent 8-1 ruling in favor of the free-speech rights of Brandi Levy, who as a 14-year-old cheerleader had posted a photo to Snapchat cursing out her school and its cheerleading program. But the historian also suggests where this ruling came up short: In recent decades the Court has sought to widen public schools' parental and paternalist reach, shrinking the sphere of students' free speech rights... In Levy's case, she was using social media off-campus, outside of school hours, to express a criticism of an extracurricular activity. If her school could control that speech, then there would be very little space left for Levy to express herself.

Yet the Court took too modest an approach to students' rights. The Mahanoy decision was much narrower than the lower court's. The Third Circuit had ruled that the school had no right to interfere with off-campus speech, a decision that would have significantly expanded students' rights. In Mahanoy, the Court ruled that schools may still regulate student speech off-campus, depending on the circumstances (though did not lay out a framework for those circumstances, leaving that to future court decisions)...

[P]ublic schools are more properly (if less creatively) understood as, well, the schools of democracy, where students are taught and guided and given an opportunity to test out the rights of citizenship. Social media have become an integral part of students' public identity — indeed, of many adults' public identity. Students should be taught about the inevitable permanence of ephemeral speech. A Snapchat snap, an Instagram story, a Twitter fleet, all designed to disappear, can easily be made permanent. Levy thought she was making a relatively private, fleeting statement, only to find it memorialized in Supreme Court jurisprudence.

But students should also have more speech protections, be allowed to criticize the institutions in which they spend so much of their time — and be largely free of their school's oversight when they are beyond the schoolhouse gates.

Hong Kong cyber activists are backing up articles by pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily on censorship-proof blockchain platforms after the newspaper was forced to shut down as it became embroiled in a national security law crackdown. From a report: The latest drive to preserve the paper's content comes after activists rushed to upload documentaries by local broadcaster RTHK investigating people in power after the media outlet said it would remove materials older than one year from its social media platforms. Under the national security law, the Hong Kong government can request the blocking or removal of content it deems subversive or secessionist, raising fears over internet freedom in the global financial hub. The Hong Kong government says use of the internet will not be affected so long as its use is within the law.

"Law enforcement actions taken by Hong Kong law enforcement agencies are based on evidence, strictly according to the laws of Hong Kong, and for the acts of the person(s) or entity(ies) concerned," a spokesman for the Security Bureau said. This year, the company that approves internet domains in Hong Kong said it would reject any sites that could incite "illegal acts." Internet service provider Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) said it had blocked access to HKChronicles, a website offering information about anti-government protests.

Affected users say social-networking site owned by Microsoft is obstructing them over 'prohibited content' without further explanation. From a report: Eyck Freymann, an Oxford University doctoral student, was surprised to get a notice from LinkedIn this month telling him his account had been blocked in China. The "Experience" section of his profile, which detailed his career history, contained "prohibited" content, he was informed. The social-networking site owned by Microsoft didn't explain more, but Mr. Freymann said he thought it was because he had included the words "Tiananmen Square massacre" in the entry for his two-year stint as a research assistant for a book in 2015. "LinkedIn is pulling people's material off without telling them why," he said. "It was surprising because I am just a graduate student. I didn't think I would have mattered."

The academic is one of a spate of LinkedIn users whose profiles have been blocked in recent weeks. The Wall Street Journal identified at least 10 other individuals who had their profiles blocked or posts removed from the China version of LinkedIn since May, including researchers in Jerusalem and Tokyo, journalists, a U.S. congressional staffer and an editor based in Beijing who posted state media reports about elephants rampaging across China. A LinkedIn spokeswoman said in a statement that while the company supports freedom of expression, offering a localized version of LinkedIn in China means adherence to censorship requirements of the Chinese government on internet platforms. The company didn't comment on whether its actions were proactive or in response to requests from Chinese authorities. LinkedIn made a trade-off to accept Chinese censorship when it entered China in 2014 and has typically censored human-rights activists and deleted content focused on posts deemed sensitive to the Chinese government. The recent dragnet stands out for having caught several academics in its path, resulting in the deletion of entire profiles instead of individual posts.

Apple on Monday said a new "private relay" feature designed to obscure a user's web browsing behavior from internet service providers and advertisers will not be available in China for regulatory reasons. From a report: The feature was one of a number of privacy protections Apple announced at its annual software developer conference on Monday, the latest in a years-long effort by the company to cut down on the tracking of its users by advertisers and other third parties. Apple's decision to withhold the feature in China is the latest in a string of compromises the company has made on privacy in a country that accounts for nearly 15% of its revenue.

In 2018, Apple moved the digital keys used to lock Chinese users' iCloud data, allowing authorities to work through domestic courts to gain access to the information. China's ruling Communist Party maintains a vast surveillance system to keep a close eye on how citizens use the country's heavily controlled internet. Under President Xi Jinping, the space for dissent in China has narrowed, while censorship has expanded. Apple's "private relay" feature first sends web traffic to a server maintained by Apple, where it is stripped of a piece of information called an IP address. From there, Apple sends the traffic to a second server maintained by a third-party operator who assigns the user a temporary IP address and sends the traffic onward to its destination website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The latest Notepad++ release has removed support for Bing search from the app after the "tank man" fiasco Microsoft had to deal with on Friday afternoon. "Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ settings for Search on Internet command, due to its poor reliability," the Notepad++ v8 announcement reads. Don Ho, the creator of Notepad++, one of the most popular open-source Notepad replacements, revealed on GitHub that the motivation behind this decision is Bing censoring results instead of doing "its job." "When a search engine does the censorship instead of its job, the search result loses its quality and it's not reliable anymore," Don Ho said in the GitHub commit removing Bing support. "Hence, Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ for "Search on Internet" command." "While there was no immediate explanation to the problem, it is a widely known fact that China forces companies with businesses within its borders to abide by its censorship rules requiring to block references to China's 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protests," notes BleepingComputer. A Microsoft spokesperson said it was "due to an accidental human error."

In August 2020, China banned Notepad++ after Don Ho protested against China's human rights violations of the Uyghur people and the Hong Kong political unrest by releasing two versions dubbed 'Stand with Hong Kong' and 'Free Uyghur.'

Bing, the search engine owned by Microsoft, is not displaying image results for a search for "Tank man," even when searching from the United States. The apparent censorship comes on the anniversary of China's violent crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. From a report: "There are no results for tank man," the Bing website reads after searching for the term. "Tank man" relates to the infamous image of a single protester standing in front of a line of Chinese tanks during the crackdown. China censors and blocks distribution of discussion of tank man and Tiananmen Square more generally. This year, anniversary events in Hong Kong have dwindled in size after authorities banned a vigil. Motherboard verified that the issue also impacts image searches on Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, which both use Bing.

UPDATE: "This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this," a Microsoft spokesperson told Gizmodo via email: As of early Friday evening, searching for "Tank Man" on Bing now returns many results — though the famous photograph only appears in passing in the form of a desktop wallpaper heavily modified to obscure the tanks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Larry Brandt, a long-time supporter of internet freedom, used his nearly 20-year-old PayPal account to put his money where his mouth is. His primary use of the payment system was to fund servers to run Tor nodes, routing internet traffic in order to safeguard privacy and avoid country-level censorship. Now Brandt's PayPal account has been shut down, leaving many questions unanswered and showing how financial censorship can hurt the cause of internet freedom around the world.

Brandt first discovered his PayPal account was restricted in March of 2021. Brandt reported to EFF: "I tried to make a payment to the hosting company for my server lease in Finland. My account wouldn't work. I went to my PayPal info page which displayed a large vertical banner announcing my permanent ban. They didn't attempt to inform me via email or phone -- just the banner." Brandt was unable to get the issue resolved directly through PayPal, and so he then reached out to EFF. [...] We found no evidence of wrongdoing that would warrant shutting down his account, and we communicated our concerns to PayPal. Given that the overwhelming majority of transactions on Brandt's account were payments for servers running Tor nodes, EFF is deeply concerned that Brandt's account was targeted for shut down specifically as a result of his activities supporting Tor.

We reached out to PayPal for clarification, to urge them to reinstate Brandt's account, and to educate them about Tor and its value in promoting freedom and privacy globally. PayPal denied that the shutdown was related to the concerns about Tor, claiming only that "the situation has been determined appropriately" and refusing to offer a specific explanation. After several weeks, PayPal has still refused to reinstate Brandt's account. [...] EFF is calling on PayPal to do better by its customers, and that starts by embracing the Santa Clara principles [which attempt to guide companies in centering human rights in their decisions to ban users or take down content]. Specifically, we are calling on them to: publish a transparency report, provide meaningful notice to users, and adopt a meaningful appeal process. The Tor Project said in an email: "This is the first time we have heard about financial persecution for defending internet freedom in the Tor community. We're very concerned about PayPal's lack of transparency, and we urge them to reinstate this user's account. Running relays for the Tor network is a daily activity for thousands of volunteers and relay associations around the world. Without them, there is no Tor -- and without Tor, millions of users would not have access to the uncensored internet."

Brandt says he's not backing down and is still committed to supporting the Tor network to pay for servers around the world using alternative means. "Tor is of critical importance for anyone requiring anonymity of location or person," says Brandt. "I'm talking about millions of people in China, Iran, Syria, Belarus, etc. that wish to communicate outside their country but have prohibitions against such activities. We need more incentives to add to the Tor project, not fewer."

NBC News reports: Facebook is grappling with a reputation crisis in the Middle East, with plummeting approval rates and advertising sales in Arab countries, according to leaked documents obtained by NBC News.

The shift corresponds with the widespread belief by pro-Palestinian and free speech activists that the social media company has been disproportionately silencing Palestinian voices on its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — during this month's Israel-Hamas conflict... Instagram has taken the greatest reputational hit, according to a presentation authored by a Dubai-based Facebook employee that was leaked to NBC News, with its approval ratings among users falling to a historical low.

The social media company regularly polls users of Facebook and Instagram about how much they believe the company cares about them. Facebook converts the results into a 'Cares About Users' metric which acts as a bellwether for the apps' popularity. Since the start of the latest Israel-Hamas conflict, the metric among Instagram users in Facebook's Middle East and North Africa region is at its lowest in history, and fell almost 5 percentage points in a week, according to the research... Instagram's score measuring whether users think the app is good for the world, referred to as 'Good For World,' has also dropped in the region to its lowest level after losing more than 5 percentage points in a week...

The low approval ratings have been compounded by a campaign by pro-Palestinian and free speech activists to target Facebook with 1-star reviews on the Apple and Google app stores. The campaign tanked Facebook's average rating from above 4 out of 5 stars on both app stores to 2.2 on the App Store and 2.3 on Google Play as of Wednesday. According to leaked internal posts, the issue has been categorized internally as a "severity 1" problem for Facebook, which is the second highest priority issue after a "severity 0" incident, which is reserved for when the website is down. "Users are feeling that they are being censored, getting limited distribution, and ultimately silenced," one senior software engineer said in a post on Facebook's internal message board. "As a result, our users have started protesting by leaving 1 star reviews."

Internal documents connect the reputational damage to a decline in advertising sales in the Middle East. According to the leaked presentation, Facebook's ad sales in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Iraq dropped at least 12 percent in the 10 days after May 7.
NBC adds that pro-Palestinian civil society group believe Israel is flooding Facebook with reports of violations. "The Israeli government is spending millions on digital tools and campaigns targeting social media content," said Mona Shtaya from 7amleh, a nonprofit that focuses on Palestinians' digital rights.

The article points out that Israel "also funds a program that pays students to post and report content on social media in what is described as 'online public diplomacy.'"

"Just days after violent conflict erupted in Israel and the Palestinian territories, both Facebook and Twitter copped to major faux pas: The companies had wrongly blocked or restricted millions of mostly pro-Palestinian posts and accounts related to the crisis," reports the Washington Post: Activists around the world charged the companies with failing a critical test: whether their services would enable the world to watch an important global event unfold unfettered through the eyes of those affected. The companies blamed the errors on glitches in artificial intelligence software.

In Twitter's case, the company said its service mistakenly identified the rapid-firing tweeting during the confrontations as spam, resulting in hundreds of accounts being temporarily locked and the tweets not showing up when searched for. Facebook-owned Instagram gave several explanations for its problems, including a software bug that temporarily blocked video-sharing and saying its hate speech detection software misidentified a key hashtag as associated with a terrorist group.

The companies said the problems were quickly resolved and the accounts restored. But some activists say many posts are still being censored. Experts in free speech and technology said that's because the issues are connected to a broader problem: overzealous software algorithms that are designed to protect but end up wrongly penalizing marginalized groups that rely on social media to build support... Despite years of investment, many of the automated systems built by social media companies to stop spam, disinformation and terrorism are still not sophisticated enough to detect the difference between desirable forms of expression and harmful ones. They often overcorrect, as in the most recent errors during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or they under-enforce, allowing harmful misinformation and violent and hateful language to proliferate...

Jillian York, a director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that opposes government surveillance, has researched tech company practices in the Middle East. She said she doesn't believe that content moderation — human or algorithmic — can work at scale... Palestinian activists and experts who study social movements say it was another watershed historical moment in which social media helped alter the course of events...

Payment app Venmo also mistakenly suspended transactions of humanitarian aid to Palestinians during the war. The company said it was trying to comply with U.S. sanctions and had resolved the issues.

Russia is increasingly pressuring Google, Twitter and Facebook to fall in line with Kremlin internet crackdown orders or risk restrictions inside the country, as more governments around the world challenge the companies' principles on online freedom. From a report: Russia's internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, recently ramped up its demands for the Silicon Valley companies to remove online content that it deems illegal or restore pro-Kremlin material that had been blocked. The warnings have come at least weekly since services from Facebook, Twitter and Google were used as tools for anti-Kremlin protests in January. If the companies do not comply, the regulator has said, they face fines or access to their products may be throttled.

The latest clashes flared up this week, when Roskomnadzor told Google on Monday to block thousands of unspecified pieces of illegal content or it would slow access to the company's services. On Tuesday, a Russian court fined Google 6 million rubles, or about $81,000, for not taking down another piece of content. On Wednesday, the government ordered Facebook and Twitter to store all data on Russian users within the country by July 1 or face fines. In March, the authorities had made it harder for people to see and send posts on Twitter after the company did not take down content that the government considered illegal. Twitter has since removed roughly 6,000 posts to comply with the orders, according to Roskomnadzor. The regulator has threatened similar penalties against Facebook.

Russian authorities on Tuesday fined Google 6 million rubles, or just under $82,000, after the company failed to comply with Moscow's demands to delete prohibited online content. Engadget reports: On Monday, Russia's internet watchdog, Roskomnadzor, gave Google 24 hours to delete more than 26,000 instances of online media considered to be illegal in the country. If their demands weren't met, authorities threatened to slow down Google's services in Russia and levy fines of up to 10 percent of the company's annual revenue. Today, Roskomnadzor fined Google in three batches at 2 million rubles apiece, alleging administrative offenses in each case, according to Reuters. Much of the prohibited content involves calls for social action following the detention of high-profile Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny in January.

Apple refused a request from Facebook to remove negative reviews in the App store after pro-Palestinian protesters coordinated an effort to tank ratings because of censorship of Palestinian content, NBC News reported. From a report: On Saturday, the Facebook app had a 2.3 out of five-star rating in the App store compared to a more than four-star rating last week. The largest category of ratings is one-star reviews, with many comments saying their rating is due to Facebook censoring hashtags like #FreePalestine or #GazaUnderAttack.

"User trust is dropping considerably with the recent escalations between Israel and Palestine," said one senior software engineer in a post on Facebook's internal message board, NBC reported. "Our users are upset with our handling of the situation. Users are feeling that they are being censored, getting limited distribution, and ultimately silenced. As a result, our users have started protesting by leaving 1 star reviews." An internal message reviewed by NBC showed that the company was very concerned about the coordinated effort to tank ratings, categorizing the issue as an SEV1, which stands for "severity 1."

Facebook says that its services were interrupted 84 times in 19 countries in the second half of last year, compared to 52 disruptions in eight countries that took place during the first half of the year. From a report: That's a symptom of a growing trend among countries to restrict access to social media and the open internet. [...] During the last six months of 2020, Facebook also said government requests for user data increased 10% from 173,592 to 191,013. The company says it continues to scrutinize all government requests for any user data.

Of the total volume, the U.S. continues to submit the largest number of requests, followed by India, Germany, France, Brazil and the U.K. Similarly, from the first half of 2020 to the second, the number of times Facebook had to restrict access to content based on local law increased 93% globally, from 22,120 to 42,606. Those increases, Facebook says, were driven mainly by increases in requests from the U.K., Turkey and Brazil.

Apple has compromised on data security to placate Chinese authorities, the New York Times reported Monday, citing internal company documents and interviews with current and former Apple employees and security experts. An excerpt from the story: At the data center in Guiyang, which Apple hoped would be completed by next month, and another in the Inner Mongolia region, Apple has largely ceded control to the Chinese government. Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they're meant to secure.

[...] In China, Apple has ceded legal ownership of its customers' data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, or GCBD, a company owned by the government of Guizhou Province, whose capital is Guiyang. Apple recently required its Chinese customers to accept new iCloud terms and conditions that list GCBD as the service provider and Apple as "an additional party." Apple told customers the change was to "improve iCloud services in China mainland and comply with Chinese regulations."

The terms and conditions included a new provision that does not appear in other countries: "Apple and GCBD will have access to all data that you store on this service" and can share that data "between each other under applicable law." Under the new setup, Chinese authorities ask GCBD -- not Apple -- for Apple customers' data, Apple said. Apple believes that gives it a legal shield from American law, according to a person who helped create the arrangement. GCBD declined to answer questions about its Apple partnership. Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins, commented on Times' story: "Apple asked a lot of people to back them against the FBI in 2015. They used every tool in the legal arsenal to prevent the US from gaining access to their phones. Do they think anyone is going to give them the benefit of the doubt now?"

A prominent critic of China based in the U.K. said Microsoft's LinkedIn froze his account and removed content criticizing the country's government, the latest in a series of allegations that the networking website had censored users -- even outside of the Asian nation -- to appease authorities in Beijing. From a report: Peter Humphrey, a British corporate investigator and former journalist who accesses LinkedIn from his home in Surrey, England, said he received notification from LinkedIn last month that comments he had published on the platform had been removed. The comments, seen by Bloomberg News, called the Chinese government a "repressive dictatorship" and criticized the country's state media organizations as "propaganda mouthpieces."

In late April, Humphrey said LinkedIn sent him several notifications that critical comments he posted about China's government and state-controlled broadcaster China Global Television Network, or CGTN, had been removed, on the grounds that the comments constituted "bullying and harassment" or "spam and scams." On April 26, Humphrey said he couldn't access his LinkedIn profile. When Humphrey tried to log in, he said he was met with a message stating his profile had been "restricted" due to "behavior that appears to violate our Terms of Service." After Bloomberg News contacted LinkedIn for comment last week, the company reinstated Humphrey's account and restored some of his comments. Others were not. "Our team has reviewed the action, based on our appeals process, and found it was an error," said Leonna Spilman, a spokeswoman for LinkedIn. Spilman declined to comment further regarding Humphrey's account.

To settle a lawsuit, the city of Fullerton California "has agreed to pay $350,000 and take back its accusations of criminal computer hacking" against two local bloggers, reports the Orange County Register. The settlement ends what the newspaper calls "a contentious fight over censorship and freedom of speech." The lawsuit accused Joshua Ferguson and David Curlee of stealing computerized personnel files from a Dropbox account to which the city had mistakenly given them access. Some of the files were later published online... Attorney Kelly Aviles, representing the bloggers, said she was pleased with the settlement, but the litigation could have been avoided. "The city shouldn't have tried to blame their mistakes on journalists trying to cover the city," Aviles said. "It was unbelievably wrong ... those kind of people should never be in public office..."

Under the terms of the deal, Aviles will be paid $230,000, while Ferguson and Curlee will receive $60,000 each. Additionally, the city must publish a public apology on the home page of its website, Aviles said. While no formal charges were brought against the bloggers, the city's accusations of criminal conduct cost them friends and family members. She said Ferguson was fired from his job. "It was really traumatic for them," Aviles said.

In turn, the bloggers must return the remaining confidential records — which they don't plan on publishing anyway, Aviles said.

Long-awaited proposals in the UK to regulate social media are a "recipe for censorship," campaigners have said, which fly in the face of the government's attempts to strengthen free speech elsewhere in Britain. From a report: The online safety bill, which was introduced to parliament on Wednesday, hands Ofcom the power to punish social networks which fail to remove "lawful but harmful" content. The proposals were welcomed by children's safety campaigns, but theyhave come under fire from civil liberties organisations. "Applying a health and safety approach to everybody's online speech combined with the threat of massive fines against the platforms is a recipe for censorship and removal of legal content," said Jim Killock, the director of the Open Rights Group. "Facebook does not operate prisons and is not the police. Trying to make platforms do the job of law enforcement through technical means is a recipe for failure."

The centre-right CPS thinktank was similarly critical. "It is for parliament to determine what is sufficiently harmful that it should not be allowed, not for Ofcom or individual platforms to guess," it said. "If something is legal to say, it should be legal to type," CPS's director, Robert Colvile, added. In its update to the bill from the white paper first drafted by Theresa May's government in 2019, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport added sections intended to prevent harm to free expression. Social networks will now need to perform and publish "assessments of their impact on freedom of expression."

"After more than 25 years of Canadian governments pursuing a hands-off approach to the online world, the government of Justin Trudeau is now pushing Bill C-10, a law that would see Canadians subjected to the most regulated internet in the free world," argues the Vancouver Sun (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader theshowmecanuck): Although pitched as a way to expand Canadian content provisions to the online sphere, the powers of Bill C-10 have expanded considerably in committee, including a provision introduced last week that could conceivably allow the federal government to order the deletion of any Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or Twitter upload made by a Canadian. In comments this week, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh indicated his party was open to providing the votes needed to pass C-10, seeing the bill as a means to combat online hate...

The users themselves may not necessarily be subject to direct CRTC regulation, but social media providers would have to answer to every post on their platforms as if it were a TV show or radio program. This might be a good time to mention that members of the current Liberal cabinet have openly flirted with empowering the federal government to control social media. In a September Tweet, Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna said that if social media companies "can't regulate yourselves, governments will." Guilbeault, the prime champion of Bill C-10, has spoken openly of a federal regulator that could order takedowns of any social media post that it deems to be hateful or propagandistic...

Basically, if your Canadian website isn't a text-only GeoCities blog from 1996, Bill C-10 thinks it's a program deserving of CRTC regulation. This covers news sites, podcasts, blogs, the websites of political parties or activist groups and even foreign websites that might be seen in Canada...

The penalties prescribed by Bill C-10 are substantial. For corporations, a first offence can yield penalties of up to $10 million, while subsequent offences could be up to $15 million apiece. If TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are suddenly put in a situation where their millions of users must follow the same rules as a Canadian cable channel or radio station, it's not unreasonable to assume they may just follow Facebook's example [in Australia] and take the nuclear option.

"Ville de Bitche is a town situated in northwestern France with a rich military history, pastoral landscape, and an unfortunate sounding name," reports Slate. (Adding that the "e" is silent....)

"Recently tiny Bitche made international headlines after Facebook mistook the city's name for a swear word and deleted the town's Facebook page." The city's communication manager, Valêrie Degouy, contacted Facebook on March 19 to explain the situation and ask the company to reverse its decision — for the second time. (The page was previously deleted in 2016.) As she awaited Facebook's response — which apologized and reinstated the page Tuesday — Degouy set up a new page for her town, under the name of Marie 57230, her city's postal code. Although Facebook's mistake seems innocuous enough, for the towns located around Bitche, local Facebook pages serve as the main form of communication. Shutting the page down effectively creates a local news blackout. When Rohrbach-les Bitche — a nearby town in the region — heard about the deletion, it quickly rid "ls-Bitche" from its Facebook page name to avoid a similar fate...

The residents of Bitche are far from alone in their reliance on Facebook for local news. In the United States alone, more than 2,000 local newspapers have closed over the past two decades, according to an estimate from Joshua Scacco, associate professor of political communication at the University of South Florida. In these news deserts, Facebook has risen as an alternative information source, allowing anyone with an account to share updates and post events...

But Facebook is not only filling the local news void — it is tied to local papers' disappearance. "Social and digital media are a contributing factor in thinking about the declines of the presence of local newsrooms, as well as what that coverage looks like for the local newsrooms that remain," Scacco says. Facebook is moving advertising dollars away from local newspapers, and even driving the content local newspapers create. Local news coverage often panders to Facebook's algorithms when creating content and headlines, notes Ashley Muddiman, a communications professor at the University of Kansas.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Newsweek: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki received a "Free Expression" award from the Freedom Forum Institute in a virtual ceremony sponsored by YouTube, an online video platform owned by Google. On Thursday, YouTube creator Molly Burke presented Wojcicki with the accolade in a video shared to the platform. "I'm so excited to be here tonight to present Susan Wojcicki with the Free Expression award. As the CEO of YouTube, Susan is facing some of the most critical issues around free expression today," Burke said.

Following the ceremony, some Twitter users mocked Wojcicki for receiving an award that was sponsored by her own platform. "YouTube CEO won a Free Speech award...sponsored by YouTube. Hahahahhhaahhhahhahahahaaaaaaa," one user wrote. Another wrote, "Lol, youtube receiving an award for free expression/pro first amendment is Orwellian s***. What's next, Facebook getting an award for respecting privacy?"