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      As X bleeds cash, Musk threatens Anti-Defamation League with defamation lawsuit

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 5 September, 2023 - 17:25

    As X bleeds cash, Musk threatens Anti-Defamation League with defamation lawsuit

    Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency / Contributor | Anadolu Agency )

    Last month, X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, sued a group of hate speech researchers in the United Kingdom, claiming that they had instigated advertiser boycotts that allegedly lost the platform "tens of millions" of dollars. Now, X owner Elon Musk has threatened to sue another group advocating against hate speech, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which Musk claimed did even more damage—allegedly causing X to lose billions in ad revenue.

    Musk spent the long weekend posting on X about his concerns with the ADL. He claimed that the ADL "has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it and me of being anti-Semitic," saying that "based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, the ADL seems to be responsible for most" of X's revenue loss.

    "Our US advertising revenue is still down 60 percent, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!" Musk posted on X.

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      Fighting VPN criminalization should be Big Tech’s top priority, activists say

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 20 March, 2023 - 11:00 · 1 minute

    Fighting VPN criminalization should be Big Tech’s top priority, activists say

    Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

    “Women, life, freedom” became the protest chant of a revolution still raging in Iran months after a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died while in custody of morality police. Amini was arrested last September for “improperly” wearing a hijab and violating the Islamic Republic's mandatory dress code laws. Since then, her name has become a viral hashtag invoked by millions of online activists protesting authoritarian regimes around the globe.

    In response to Iran's ongoing protests—mostly led by women and young people—Iranian authorities have increasingly restricted Internet access. First, they temporarily blocked popular app stores and indefinitely blocked social media apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. They then implemented sporadic mobile shutdowns wherever protests flared up. Perhaps most extreme, authorities responded to protests in southeast Iran in February by blocking the Internet outright, Al Arabiya reported . Digital and human rights experts say motivations include controlling information, keeping protestors offline, and forcing protestors to use state services where their online activities can be more easily tracked—and sometimes trigger arrests.

    As getting online has become increasingly challenging for everyone in Iran—not just protestors—millions have learned to rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide Internet activity, circumvent blocks, and access accurate information beyond state propaganda. Simply put, VPNs work by masking a user's IP address so that governments have a much more difficult time monitoring activity or detecting a user's location. They do this by routing the user's data to the VPN provider's remote servers, making it much harder for an ISP (or a government) to correlate the Internet activity of the VPN provider's servers with the individual users actually engaging in that activity.

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      YouTuber must pay $40K in attorneys’ fees for daft “reverse censorship” suit

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 10 March, 2023 - 20:24

    YouTuber must pay $40K in attorneys’ fees for daft “reverse censorship” suit

    Enlarge (credit: picture alliance / Contributor | picture alliance )

    A YouTuber, Marshall Daniels—who has posted far-right-leaning videos under the name “Young Pharaoh” since 2015—tried to argue that YouTube violated his First Amendment rights by removing two videos discussing George Floyd and COVID-19. Years later, Daniels now owes YouTube nearly $40,000 in attorney fees for filing a frivolous lawsuit against YouTube owner Alphabet, Inc.

    A United States magistrate judge in California, Virginia K. DeMarchi, ordered Daniels to pay YouTube $38,576 for asserting a First Amendment claim that “clearly lacked merit and was frivolous from the outset.” YouTube said this represents a conservative estimate and likely an underestimate of fees paid defending against the meritless claim.

    In his defense, Daniels never argued that the fees Alphabet was seeking were excessive or could be burdensome. In making this rare decision in favor of the defendant Alphabet, DeMarchi had to consider Daniels’ financial circumstances. In his court filings, Daniels described himself as “a fledgling individual consumer,” but also told the court that he made more than $180,000 in the year before he filed his complaint. DeMarchi ruled that the fees would not be a burden to Daniels.

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