Censoring

Suraj Patel — a Democratic congressional candidate in New York — is accusing Hulu of requiring his campaign to remove language related to abortion, climate change, and gun laws from a campaign ad before it would be allowed to air on the platform, as first reported by Jezebel on Wednesday. According to Patel, a Hulu representative called his campaign notifying them that the 30-second ad violated an “unwritten Hulu policy” related to “sensitive” content in political ads shortly after it was submitted to the platform on…

US senators on Monday demanded Meta address reports that its Facebook and Instagram social networks have been censoring information about how to legally get an abortion.Democratic senators Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren gave Meta until July 15 to answer questions including how many posts about abortion have been removed since the US Supreme Court overturned a long-standing right to such medical care."Reports indicate that multiple posts providing accurate information about how to legally access abortion services were…

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday put back on hold a controversial Texas law barring social media platforms from "censoring" posts based on viewpoints.The law threatens to essentially make it a crime for social media platforms to curb hate speech or bigoted tirades, or even point out when posts are demonstrably false.Political conservatives have accused Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants of stifling their voices, providing no evidence to support the claims.Social media platforms have consistently defended…

The impact For now, there’s little clue as to what prompted the change, but censorship of certain types of language—profanity, pornography, and politically sensitive words—has been creeping up on the platform for a while. On Gitee’s official and public feedback page, there are multiple user complaints about how projects were censored for unclear reasons, possibly because technical language was mistaken for a sensitive word. The immediate result of Gitee’s May 18 change was that public projects hosted on the platform…

A Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.37% search engine has made it harder in North America to look up people who are politically sensitive for China, according to a cybersecurity and surveillance group report.Bing’s autofill system, which offers guesses on what users are searching for after a few keystrokes, often fell silent in connection to names the Chinese government deems sensitive, Citizen Lab said in the report Thursday. Last year Microsoft suspended the autofill feature in…