Oversight

has raised concerns over automated moderation while overturning a decision by the company to leave a Holocaust denial post on Instagram. Holocaust denial is deemed hate speech under Meta's policies. The post in question depicted Squidward from SpongeBob Squarepants and purported to include true facts about the Holocaust. However, the claims "were either blatantly untrue or misrepresented historical facts," the Oversight Board said.Users reported the post six times after it first appeared in September 2020, but in four…

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday defended its authority to oversee certain cryptocurrency assets in court, as Binance urged a federal judge to dismiss the regulator's case against the world's largest crypto exchange.Monday's hearing over Binance's request marked the second closely-watched courtroom battle in less than a week that could help define the U.S. securities regulator's jurisdiction over the crypto sector. Last week, Coinbase and the SEC clashed over similar questions.Elevate Your Tech…

Canada's forestry sector is responsible for far more greenhouse gas emissions than show up in official tallies, potentially leading to policies that aren't in line with the country's climate goals, a new study suggests.The peer-reviewed study, published in the academic journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, found that annual greenhouse gas emissions attributable to forestry between 2005 and 2021 were, on average, nearly 91 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent — which would put the sector on par with…

On Tuesday night, the United States Senate tabled a resolution that would have required the State Department to report to Congress on Israeli human rights violations committed in Gaza involving the use of U.S. arms and equipment.  Only 11 senators voted in favor of the resolution: nine Democrats , one Republican , and one Independent . 72 senators voted against advancing the resolution. “The United States is complicit in the nightmare that millions of Palestinians are now experiencing,” Sanders, who…

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This weekly newsletter is part of a CBC News initiative entitled "Our Changing Planet" to show and explain the effects of climate change. Keep up with the latest news on our Climate and Environment page.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Thursday.This week: Electric garbage trucks clean up in a variety of ways Hot enough for ya? 2023 shattered planetary heat records Carbon offsets are helping protect B.C.'s Great Bear Rainforest. Is that sustainable?…

Cher is asking a Los Angeles judge to make her conservator of her son’s estate, saying that Elijah Blue Allman is not currently capable of managing his own finances. Allman is the son of late musician Gregg Allman, who died in 2017, and receives distributions from the G.A. Robbins Descendants Revocable Trust. According to a petition filed Tuesday, a temporary conservator is urgently needed because there are assets that must be distributed by Dec. 31 and he is “currently unable to manage his assets…

After Manish Lachwani founded the Silicon Valley software startup HeadSpin in 2015, he inflated the company's revenue numbers by nearly fourfold and falsely claimed that firms including Apple and American Express were customers. He showed a profit where there were losses. He used HeadSpin's cash to make risky trades on tech stocks. And he created fake invoices to cover it all up.What was especially breathtaking was how easily Lachwani, now 48, pulled all that off.Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill…

Human rights advocates hoped to show this was not just a one-off incident, but a systemic issue ignored by the local government. In fact, Fengxian, the county where the woman lived, has long had an infamous reputation for allowing women to be abducted and sold to men looking to procreate.  By searching CJO, advocates found at least two previous cases in which abducted women filed for divorce in Fengxian and were denied; they also found that people who were prosecuted in the county for human trafficking received minimal…

Meta's own independent oversight board has issued some harsh criticism over the manner in which Meta's various platforms handled posts around the Israel-Hamas conflict. The board urged Meta to preserve removed posts that might contain evidence of human rights violations…

Meta Platforms' Oversight Board said on Tuesday that the social media company erred in removing two videos depicting hostages and injured people in the Israel-Hamas conflict, saying the videos were valuable to understanding human suffering in the war.Since Hamas' attack in Israel on October 7, social media platforms have seen renewed scrutiny over their content moderation practices due to a surge in misinformation and accusations that the companies have promoted certain viewpoints about the conflict.Elevate Your Tech…