Month: July 2020

The Chinese-owned app TikTok is under a security review by the U.S. government, which will make a recommendation on the matter to President Donald Trump next week, according to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.Trump said Wednesday, “we are thinking about making a decision” about TikTok.The video-sharing social media app, is extremely popular in both the US. and around the world. It has already been downloaded 2 billion times worldwide and 165 million of those downloads were in the U.S.The app features not only entertainment videos, but also debates and takes positions on political issues, such as racial justice and the upcoming U.S. presidential election.TikTok to Exit Hong Kong Market Over New National Security Law Decision by Chinese-based app follows decisions by Facebook, Google and Twitter to briefly suspend review of Beijing requests for user data in semi-autonomous city U.S. officials are concerned that TikTok may pose a security threat, fearing that the company might share its user data with China’s government. However, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has said it does not share user data with the Chinese government and maintains that it only stores U.S. user data in the U.S. and Singapore. TikTok also recently chose former Disney executive Kevin Mayer as its chief executive in a move seen as an effort to distance itself from Beijing.Mnuchin said that the U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS), an interagency group led by the Treasury Department, will be looking into TikTok. CFIUS’ job is to oversee foreign investments and assess them for potential national security risks.CFIUS has the ability to force companies to cancel deals or put in place other measures it deems necessary for national security.
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Holocaust survivors around the world are lending their voices to a campaign launched Wednesday targeting Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to take action to remove denial of the Nazi genocide from the social media site.
Coordinated by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the #NoDenyingIt campaign uses Facebook itself to make the survivors’ entreaties to Zuckerberg heard, posting one video per day  urging him to remove Holocaust-denying groups, pages and posts as hate speech. Videos will also be posted on Facebook-owned Instagram, as well as Twitter.
Zuckerberg raised the ire of the Claims Conference and others with comments in 2018 to the tech website Recode that posts denying the Nazi annihilation of 6 million Jews would not necessarily be removed. He said he did not think Holocaust deniers were “intentionally” getting it wrong, and that as long as posts were not calling for harm or violence, even offensive content should be protected.
After an outcry, Zuckerberg, who is Jewish himself, clarified that while he personally found “Holocaust denial deeply offensive” he believed that “the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech.”
Since then, Facebook representatives have met with the Claims Conference but the group, which negotiates compensation payments from Germany for Holocaust victims, says Zuckerberg himself has refused to. The goal of the campaign is to get him to sit down with Holocaust survivors so that they can personally tell him their stories and make their case that denial violates Facebook’s hate speech standards and should be removed.
“In Germany or in Austria people go to prison if they deny the Holocaust because they know it’s a lie, it’s libel,” said Eva Schloss, an Auschwitz survivor who today lives in London and has recorded a message for Zuckerberg.
“How can somebody really doubt it? Where are the 6 million people? There are tens of thousands of photos taken by the Nazis themselves. They were proud of what they were doing. They don’t deny it, they know they did it.”
Schloss’ family escaped before the war from Vienna to the Netherlands, where she became friends with Anne Frank, who lived nearby in Amsterdam and was the same age. After the German army overran the country, the Schloss and Frank families went into hiding but were discovered by the Nazis separately in 1944, the Schloss family betrayed by a Dutch woman.
Schloss and her mother survived Auschwitz, but her father and brother were killed, while Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was the only survivor of his immediate family and married Schloss’ mother after the war. Otto Frank published his daughter’s now-famous diary so that the world could hear her story. Schloss has written about her own story, is a frequent speaker and would like to tell Zuckerberg of her own experience.
“It was just every day, the chimneys were smoking, the smell of burning flesh,” the 91-year-old told The Associated Press, adding that she had been separated from her mother and assumed she had been gassed.
“Can you imagine that feeling? I was 15-years-old and I felt alone in the world and it was terrible.”
Facebook said in a statement that it takes down Holocaust denial posts in countries where it is illegal, like Germany, France and Poland, while in countries where it is not an offense, like the U.S. and Britain, it is carefully monitored to determine whether it crosses the line into what is allowed.
“We take down any post that celebrates, defends, or attempts to justify the Holocaust,” Facebook told the AP. “The same goes for any content that mocks Holocaust victims, accuses victims of lying about the atrocities, spews hate, or advocates for violence against Jewish people in any way. Posts and articles that deny the Holocaust often violate one or more of these standards and are removed from Facebook.”
Earlier this month, a two-year audit of Facebook’s civil rights record found “serious setbacks” that have marred the social network’s progress on matters such as hate speech, misinformation and bias. Zuckerberg is one of four CEOs of big tech firms who face a grilling by the U.S. Congress on Wednesday over the way they dominate the market.
More than 500 companies on July 1 began an advertising boycott intended to pressure Facebook into taking a stronger stand against hate speech. The Claims Conference decided to launch its own campaign after concluding the boycott “doesn’t seem to be making a dent,” said Greg Schneider, the Claims Conference’s executive vice president.
Several Holocaust denial groups have been identified on Facebook by the New York-based Anti-Defamation League, some hidden and most private.
On one, “Real World War 2 History,” administrators are clearly aware of the fine line between what is and isn’t allowed, listing among its rules that members must “avoid posts that feature grotesque cartoons that FB censors can construe as racist or hateful.”
Another page, the “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust,” features regular posts of revisionist videos, including one from February in which the commentator says the Zyklon B gas used to kill Jews in Nazi death camps was actually employed to kill the lice that spread typhus, claiming “this chemical was used to improve the inmates’ health and reduce, not increase, camp mortality.”
Though not overtly advocating attacks, such postings are meant to “perpetuate a myth, anti-Semitic tropes that somehow Jews made this up in order to gain sympathy or political advantage” and could easily incite violence, Schneider said.
“The United Nations has acknowledged that Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism, and of course anti-Semitism is hate speech,” he said.
For Charlotte Knobloch, a prominent German Jewish leader who survived the Holocaust in hiding as a young girl and is participating in the campaign, it is particularly important for social media platforms to be vigilant about preventing denial because many in younger generations rely on them for information.
“They have a particular responsibility,” the 87-year-old told the AP.
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They control the digital spaces where many around the world spend their time, shop, work, and talk to friends and family.  Together, the companies’ combined annual sales are roughly the same as the gross domestic product of Saudi Arabia, as Axios notes.Now the CEOs of four top U.S. technology companies — Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google – are set to answer questions Wednesday in front of the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust about how they wield their considerable market power. Deposition for the world The hearing comes as federal and state regulators are looking into whether the tech giants, through their dominance in some markets, stifle competition.  The joint appearance of Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sundar Pichai of Google and Jeff Bezos of Amazon is a sign of how high the stakes are for the future of their businesses, legal observers say. Critics, customers and regulators globally will be watching.  “This is a deposition for the whole world,” said William Kovacic, a former Federal Trade Commission member and now a law professor at George Washington University.  Asking the questions will be the 15 members of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, lawmakers from both political parties, who have spent the past year looking into antitrust and competition concerns with each firm.  The report on their probe is expected at the end of the summer, but the lawmakers’ questions will likely reveal what they have learned and some of their thinking about what they may do next, legal experts say.    A first for Amazon’s Bezos The hearing, in many ways, is unprecedented. Never before have these CEOs appeared together in front of a congressional hearing, albeit over video conference due to the coronavirus pandemic.  It will be the first time Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon and the richest person in the world, will testify before Congress.  “This is an important accountability exercise,” Kovacic said. “It does demonstrate that the branches of government responsible for high-level policymaking have the capacity to hold these powerful executives and their extraordinary companies to account. So that’s important. To remind them who does set larger policy.”  Daniel Crane, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said the hearing is an opportunity for the tech leaders to show they understand concerns about the power they have over people’s lives.  “That’s what I’m hoping to hear, these CEOs saying, ‘We hear you, we hear the concerns that are being expressed, and here is the way we come to the table to be part of the solution,’” Crane said.  Changed tone in Washington  The hearing also shines a spotlight on U.S. regulators and lawmakers, whose job it is to set policies and enforce laws that stop firms from using their market dominance to kill competition. They have been under increasing criticism from some antitrust experts that the government’s oversight of these giants has been weak, especially compared to stronger enforcement in Europe.  In recent years, the tone has changed in Washington from one of caution about taking on Big Tech to one of resolve that something has to be done, Kovacic said.  “U.S. agencies are also weary of watching the Europeans do everything and realizing that policy in a variety of areas — privacy, competition — is being set in Europe. And if the U.S. doesn’t play, it will continue to be set in Europe,” he said.  Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, a competition think tank, said she will watch the hearing for signs that lawmakers want to pursue “robust enforcement.” On her anti-monopoly wish list is “structural breakups” of the tech giants and blocking companies from buying smaller companies seen as threats.  “These problems are really deep and really widespread, and we need to really use the whole anti-monopoly tool kit to address them,” said Hubbard, a former assistant attorney general for antitrust enforcement in the New York attorney general’s office.    Lawmakers’ challenge    Lawmakers can’t charge the tech companies with antitrust violations or attempt to break them into smaller entities.  But what they can do is change the laws and put pressure on regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice to do more to enforce existing regulations.  The Justice Department is reportedly likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google. State regulators may join the Justice Department or pursue their own cases, according to reports.Part of the challenge lawmakers face at the hearing will be that while Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon are the Who’s Who of internet firms, in fact their businesses are not really the same.  Still, the policies set by lawmakers in the months and years ahead will likely affect Big Tech for years to come.  
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The New York Times Wednesday said the Vatican’s computer networks have been breached by Chinese hackers since May, in an apparent espionage effort before the start of sensitive talks between the Roman Catholic Church and Communist China. The Times says the attack, discovered by private U.S.-based cybersecurity and monitoring firm Recorded Future, appears to be the first time hackers have been publicly caught directly hacking into the Vatican and a Hong Kong-based group of de facto Vatican representatives who have negotiated with China over the Church’s status on the mainland.  The newspaper says cybersecurity experts at Recorded Future have presumed the hackers are working for the Chinese government.   The Vatican and China are expected to begin talks in September over renewal of a provisional agreement they reached in 2018 that gives the pope the final say over bishops selected by the Communist Party for the state-sanctioned Catholic Church.  The Times says the revelations are certain to anger the Vatican and further complicate its relationship with the Chinese government.   The two sides cut off formal diplomatic ties in 1951.  The Vatican officially recognizes  Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims is a rogue breakaway territory that belongs under its control. If the Vatican and China restore diplomatic relations, Chinese officials are certain to demand that the Church cut off all ties with Taiwan.  China officially recognizes Catholicism and four other religions, but Communist Party officials often suspect religious groups and worshipers pose a threat to national security and are working to undermine the party’s grip on power.   Authorities have often used cyberattacks to gather information on groups such as Buddhist Tibetans, Muslim Uighurs and members of the outlawed Falun Gong who operate outside of China.   
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