Farewell Online Anonymity as China Scales Up Great Firewall
Last month, we wrote about Apple’s troubling compliance with the Chinese government’s rules about VPNs. Many Toronto iOS app developers saw Apple’s decision to remove VPNs from the Chinese App Store as a sign that the company is putting its business relationship with China above its so-called principles. On a practical level, this makes sense; […]
Tech Companies Stamp Out Neo-Nazis After Charlottesville
The events this weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, shocked the nation, and Trump’s equivocating response threw salt in the wound. For many years now, the trend of political polarization has made common ground harder and harder to find, but it used to be that denouncing Nazis was as American as hot dogs, sparklers, and apple pie. […]
Airbnb Kicks Alt-Right Extremists to the Curb Before Protest
One of the recurring themes in the tech world during the Trump era so far is startups’ need to align their actions with their professed values. Twitter has had to find ways to fight trolling and abuse without completely squashing free speech. Facebook and Google are attempting to fight the fake news that propagated on […]
Manifesto Heats Up the Conversation About Diversity in Tech
Like much of the rest of America, Silicon Valley has had to do some soul-searching about its values and morals over the past year or so. Stories about the vile, misogynistic work culture at Uber and the gender pay gap investigation at Google have highlighted the sexism that exists in the tech world. Many Seattle […]
Leak Reveals Facebook’s Content Moderation Policies
Tasked with monitoring content generated from 2 billion users from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, Facebook’s moderators have a tough, maybe even impossible, job. These reviewers often have less than 10 seconds to decide whether or not content is appropriate, leaving them no time for nuance. The Guardian recently obtained more than 100 internal […]
It’s Twitter vs the Government in a Battle Over Free Speech
As if President Trump’s relationship to tech wasn’t already fraught enough, Twitter announced yesterday that it is filing a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for attempting to unmask the anonymous user (or users) behind the @ALT_USCIS account. One of the several rogue government agency accounts that have popped up since the election to […]