Google boss Sundar Pichai warns of threats to free and open internet

 

The free and open internet is under attack in countries around the world, Google boss Sundar Pichai has warned.

Africa's internet & social media bans: Censorship or public service?

 

From bans on social media sites, to internet blackouts and harassment campaigns against journalists - increasingly governments across Africa are making it harder to speak out.

Who will win the battle over the future of the internet?

 China’s president says he wants to work with other countries to build a shared cyberspace community.

China has long been pushing for a greater role in global internet governance.

Now it says it wants to build a common cyberspace community.

The Philippines’ Queen of Extortion

 

We investigate how a lucrative online sex scam empire in the Philippines blackmails men around the world.

From a ramshackle village north of Manila, a seedy criminal enterprise is taking place.

Using social media and fake personas, a ruthless young gang is luring unsuspecting men from around the world into explicit online chats.

Belarus: Telegramming the uprisings

 

Powered by activists and journalists on Telegram, Belarusian protesters complete a month on the streets.

It has been just over a month since the biggest demonstrations in Belarus's history began to sweep the country, and the protests have persisted despite disproportionate state violence. The engine driving those protests can be found online - on the messaging app, Telegram.

How Does the Internet Work? - Glad You Asked

For most of us, the internet is virtual, made of Instagram posts, emails and YouTube videos. And, access to the vital utility isn’t guaranteed across the world. Glad You Asked host Cleo Abram wants to know: What is the internet actually made of? And, how does it work? Answering that question involves discovering how internet cables are laid in the sea, if 5G is really the future, and how balloons in the stratosphere are helping people connect.

Conspiracy theories on the internet

Conspiracy theories are spreading rapidly on the Internet. And they find an audience that believes them. Scientists are studying why people have a tendency to believe nonsense is true. The Internet has profoundly changed our thinking in less than two decades. No other medium has manipulated human behavior to such an extent.

How to educate children during a pandemic? | COVID-19 Special

It's a big experiment. Most schools are closed, thanks to the Coronavirus. 1.5 billion students are off school around the world. But class has gone online for many. An exciting challenge for some, but the digital playing field is anything but level. In nations with poor Internet coverage, kids are turning to radio and TV.

'I don't want to quit': Treating gaming addiction in Japan

With more and more young people addicted to online video games, is there a way to treat the disease?

More and more young people are becoming addicted to online video games.

In a controversial decision last year the World Health Organization (WHO) classified it as a disorder. The WHO defines gaming disorder as "impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite negative consequences."

Although this disorder can be found anywhere in the world and only affects a small number of people who play video games, one of the first countries to deal with the disorder is Japan.

Has the coronavirus cracked the great firewall of China?

Online anger simmers after the disease kills a doctor who was punished for sounding the alarm.

China controls the internet more than just about any country in the world.

However, the censors are struggling to contain the outrage over the coronavirus outbreak.

There's widespread anger that the disease has killed Li Wenliang, one of the first doctors to sound the alarm over the new virus.

He was arrested by police and forced to confess to "spreading rumours".

Users of China's social media network, Weibo, described his death as a national humiliation.

Even the state 

New technology: Are we trading our privacy for convenience? | The Bottom Line

How the same devices we happily carry in our pockets are being weaponised against us.

It is the age-old debate that accompanies all new advancements in technology: We love to adopt the latest tech, and we do not think too much about the consequences for our safety and privacy.

Facial recognition is great to unlock a phone, but it is also being used by security agencies to pick us out of the crowd.

The internet still holds the promise to make our lives easier and knowledge more accessible. But it comes with the price of selling ourselves to "surveillance capitalism".

Offline and silenced: Internet blackouts are going global

From Kashmir to Iran, governments are turning off the internet to stop dissent. Plus, the murky world of deepfakes.

How internet blackouts are going global

Imagine, as you read this, what an internet blackout would mean for you: being shut out of messaging sites, forced off social media, deprived of news and the means to contact loved ones.

Imagine you're Kashmiri and the Indian government has left you in the dark for the past four months.

Imagine you're Iranian, and you've just experienced your most serious internet shutdown to date.

Both of those blackouts were imposed by governments which said they were trying to prevent "security threats". However, human rights groups say it has more to do with governments trying to silence dissent.

Going incognito with VPNs in the age of surveillance

A look at why the market for Virtual Private Networks has expanded, enabling users to spread and access information.

Virtual Private Networks first came into use in 1996 and are among the most enduring innovations in online browsing with popularity on the rise around the world.

VPNs were originally developed as tools for corporations and governments to connect their offices in different countries, to make it easier for people to work together.

But as surveillance and control of the web have increased, a market has emerged and expanded - for people to work around internet blocks and to hide their location online.

How Hard Is It To Live With Censored Internet?

In Vietnam, the internet is controlled, but not nearly to the level of China. Today we talk about how internet censorship actually affects your life.

The BuzzFeed bubble bursts: Mass layoffs across digital media

Digital news outlets suffer a round of mass layoffs. Plus, the journalistic life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

BuzzFeed and the digital media bubble

It's been a bad couple of weeks for the digital news industry. More than 1,000 workers, many of them reporters, have lost their jobs at companies like BuzzFeed, Huff Post and Vice.

Just five years ago, these digital news outlets were seen as the future of journalism. But the layoffs suggest that the business model the companies all rely on, click-based advertising revenue, doesn't add up to a profitable bottom line.

Then there's the problematic reliance on Facebook and Google to distribute digital news content.

The two tech giants are eating up the bulk of digital ad revenues - leaving the BuzzFeeds of the world in roughly the same place as newspapers and other legacy news organisations before them - trying to find new models to make their businesses work.

Inside Facebook: Secrets of the Social Network

From violence to hate speech, self-harm to child abuse, is Facebook putting profit before safety?

From violence to hate speech, self-harm to child abuse, this documentary gives undercover access to how Facebook handles extreme content and asks if the company is putting profit before safety. 

There are over 1.47 billion daily active users and more than 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook. With 100 million hours of video watched every day on Facebook, how does the world's biggest social media platform decide what can and can't be posted on its site?

If users find content they think is inappropriate, they can report it to Facebook. A content moderator will then decide whether or not it breaks the platform's rules. Each of these reports is called a 

Unfriending Facebook? Internet giants and their earnings

As Facebook makes stock market history, we examine the concentration of big profits in a handful of companies.

Internet giants Facebook, Amazon and Google's parent company, Alphabet, have published their quarterly earnings reports this week.

Alphabet earned $32.7bn in revenue in the past three months, with Google churning out extraordinary amounts of profit. Alphabet reported net income of $3.2bn. Without the antitrust battle with EU regulators over Google's Android mobile software, which led to a five billion dollar fine for the quarter, it would have been $8.3bn, the company said.

This anti-sex trafficking law could end internet freedom

President Trump recently signed into law a set of controversial bills intended to make it easier to cut down on illegal sex trafficking online. Both bills — the House bill known as FOSTA, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, and the Senate bill, SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act — have been hailed by advocates as a victory for sex trafficking victims. But the new law pokes a huge hole in what is generally seen as one of the most important pieces of internet legislation ever created, Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Without this clause exempting websites from liability for the actions of their users, most websites simply couldn’t afford to exist Internet freedom advocates argue that this could lead to further eroding of an open internet — and puts sex workers on the front line.

Facebook and the murky world of digital advertising

Why the new ad men dislike regulation, but like harvesting as much personal data as possible.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called in front of the US legislators on Capitol Hill this week after it was discovered that millions of users' data was improperly obtained by a UK-based political consultancy group, Cambridge Analytica. They allegedly used that information to help target ads to support Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom.

While Zuckerberg apologised and pledged to ensure such a data breach can never happen again, this scenario is a reflection of the ever-changing world of online advertising in which technologies help companies make money from processing users' personal data.

Headlines and hyperbole: Covering the Sergei Skripal story

The Skripal affair and the battle of narratives between Russia and UK; plus, Google and Facebook's censorship tactics.

Covering the Sergei Skripal story

For the past two weeks, the story of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a retired Russian double agent, and his daughter in the UK has led news bulletins in Britain and around the world.

Much of the coverage has been low on facts, high on conjecture and speculation.

British headline writers have had a field day. Moscow meanwhile has denied any involvement and has claimed the British press is churning out "hysterical propaganda" to whip up anti-Russian sentiment.