The “cloud” has come to mean the storing and accessing of data (including programs) over the internet rather than on on our device (computer, phone or otherwise). The official definition of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology is: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of […] Read More
Please check out my presentation if you are interested in content moderation issues. I hope you will enjoy it. I provided the links to interesting articles/my resources in the slides, some are in the comments section. To listen to the presentation, I believe you need to download it.
In addition, here is the link to the Evelyn Douek’s recent talk. Per Mike Masnick (techdirt), “it would be helpful for anyone who wants to opine on content moderation to not just understand what Douek is saying, but to really internalize it.”
Please find attached my paper on whether the CRTC RT decision would survive an appeal. RT can appeal the CRTC under s.31(1) of the Broadcasting Act, or bring a Charter challenge regarding freedom of expression. Using the post-Vavilov framework, I believe the CRTC decision would likely survive all of these challenges. Let me know what you think.
Amazon banned some Twitch streams that were promoting Russian propaganda. They are removing streams providing information Russian Misinformation. Amazon claims that the number of harmful streams is low and they have been removed. The story was brought forward by the Tech Transparency Project. Both articles can be found below.
I saw this in the news this week and thought it’d be interesting to share. The federal government has introduced legislation that would require platforms like Facebook and Google to compensate news organizations for the profits they make off of having their news content on their platform. Bill C-18 will require the CRTC to decide which outlets qualify to receive a share of the profits. Apparently, 450 private news outlets have closed down in the last year as internet giants eat up 80% of their online ad revenue. This bill is designed to help struggling news organizations but a lot of the details remain murky. There are concerns these internet giants will tweak their algorithms to privilege certain news outlets over others in an attempt to continue to maximize their profits. The minister in charge of this file has stated that there are fines worked into the bill that the CRTC could utilize to prevent a situation like this. It will be interesting to see how this bill will be applied if it becomes law.
To read more about the bill check out the news story below:
I found a recent article about how Bill C-11 may negatively impact Youtube creators income. This is because “the proposed legislation that would force YouTube and other streaming platforms to actively promote Canadian content risks downgrading the popularity of that same content abroad.”
In the article, Geist says proposed law, known as Bill C-11, would make platforms including YouTube and TikTok “force-feed Canadian content” that people might not usually choose to watch, rather than curated content matched to their preferences.
You can give it a read here: https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/youtube-warns-federal-bill-could-hit-digital-creators-earnings-from-abroad-1.5835119#:~:text=Geist%20says%20proposed%20law%2C%20known,content%20matched%20to%20their%20preferences.
I found another interesting read regarding anonymity on online platforms and whether regulations should be put in place to stop anonymous internet users. This article discusses the pros and cons of allowing anonymous users and why ultimately, regulating anonymous users would not be beneficial.
You can find the article here: https://theconversation.com/ending-online-anonymity-wont-make-social-media-less-toxic-172228
I found an interesting article about recent litigation Zoom was in for customer security and privacy! It was back in late 2021, but I thought it was really interesting!
You can find the article linked here: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/zoom-agrees-to-85m-settlement-in-litigation-over-privacy-and-zoombombings
Communications Law
