Media

Albania blocks social network TikTok for at least a year starting 2025, Prime Minister Edi Rama says TikTok is the thug of the neighborhood and will be chased out

The prisoner CNN helped free from Syrian prison was the notorious torturer Salama Mohammad Salama with a long history of alleged war crimes, CNN comments that they have subsequently been investigating his background and are aware that he may have given a false identity, fact-checkers Verify-Sy notes that the man's grooming and general physical health constitute an incongruous portrayal of someone allegedly held in solitary confinement in the dark for 90 days and that there is no record of anyone in the region with the name he provided

European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) finds that the EU Commission's ad campaign on X breached the EU data protection laws as political views were processed to target the ads, the ad campaign was intended to sway opinion regarding Chat Control where EU wants to scan all electronic communications – keywords avoided by the campaign were for example #Qatargate, brexit, Christian and Vox

Rupert Murdoch loses bid to change his family trust to consolidate control of his media empire to his son Lachlan instead of dividing it equally among his four eldest children, reportedly wants his companies to continue acting as a conservative media force which Fox Corp CEO Lachlan is understood to be more aligned with, Murdoch's lawyer says they intend to appeal

X goes to court to avoid having to transfer Alex Jones' and Infowars' accounts which were said to be part of the Infowars bankruptcy sale that The Onion won, says its terms of service make it clear that accounts are ultimately owned by X and cannot be sold, Jones calls Musk a hero

US political commentator Candace Owens refused a visa to enter New Zealand because Australia banned her due to comments regarding the Holocaust and Muslims, has for instance expressed doubts regarding medical experimentation on Jews in concentration camps during World War II, planned doing a speaking tour discussing free speech and Christian faith

Australia bans social media ban for children under 16, X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Reddit but not YouTube included, the platforms bear sole responsibility for enforcement and risk fines of up to USD 33 million, 77% of Australians support the ban according to a recent YouGov poll

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy start podcast to keep the public updated on their work to reduce the US federal state, Dogecast will provide unique transparency into their process and also highlight examples of waste, fraud and misuse of tax funds

Milo Yiannopoulos makes comeback as a manager of disreputable celebrities, new company Tarantula has had Azealia Banks, Ariel Pink, Martin Shkreli and Ye as clients, Yiannopoulos also works undercover for the Trump family and helped them get rid of Laura Loomer

Alex Jones' media companies including Infowars are taken over by The Onion after bankruptcy auction, new owner intends to turn site into a parody of the kind of material it previously produced, Jones says he'll stay in studio and continue broadcasting until physically removed

FBI raid on Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan after platform gained attention for predicting Donald Trump's election victory, suspected political retaliation for challenging traditional polling and media processes

The Guardian stops posting on X, referring to how the platform has developed under Elon Musk with allegedly toxic far-right content and influence on the US presidential election, Musk responds that the newspaper is irrelevant and a vile propaganda machine

Joe Rogan's three-hour interview with Donald Trump difficult to find on Youtube who cites technical problems, Kamala Harris's campaign requires a different recording location and a one-hour time limit for the vice president to appear on the podcast, and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance's visit scheduled for Wednesday

Mel Gibson is working on a television series about the Great Siege of Malta in 1565 and was recently on a visit to the island where he met the country's Prime Minister Robert Abela, says the story of the 700 knights who won when they defended Malta against the attacks of the Ottomans is incredible

Alex Jones' media company Infowars will be sold in parts at an auction after an order by federal judge due to pay the USD 1 billion Jones was sentenced to pay for claiming the Sandy Hook school shooting never took place and was a false flag operation

The company Tortoise Media, with Karl-Johan Persson and Christina Stenbeck as two of the owners and James Harding as the largest, plans to acquire The Observer publication now owned by The Guardian

Former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo says he called Donald Trump because he was embarrassed by the reactions and lack of reactions regarding the threats against him, says he does not understand how Trump continues his campaign, how he manages to raise his fist second after being shot and barely talk about it, though clarifies that the idea of ​​him being a Trump supporter is laughable

British magazine The Spectator is bought by businessman Paul Marshall, owner of right-wing media GB News and online publication Unherd, for GBP 100 million, is profitable and has grown turnover every year since 2013

Youtube stops recommending certain types of health and fitness videos to teenagers as it can be harmful to their self-confidence and body image, the same measures were taken for the US last year

Court upholds previous ruling that the Internet Archive's activity of scanning and lending library books violates copyright laws, assesses that all four requisites for fair use speak in favor of the publisher, but judges that the site's activity is not commercial in nature, unlike the assessment of the previous instance

SpaceX's Starlink will block X in Brazil after the Supreme Court's decision to ban the platform in the country and to freeze of Starlink's assets to ensure that X pays its fines, both companies' owner Elon Musk writes that if Brazil does not return the illegally seized property they will seek reciprocal seizure of government assets too

Russian opposition journalist Sergei Mikhailov, editor of the publication Listok, is sentenced to eight years in prison for reporting on the number of dead civilians in the Kiev suburb of Butja and Mariupol in Donetsk, something that the court judge was knowlingly spreading of fake information

X, formerly Twitter, is being shut down in Brazil after order from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre De Moraes citing refusal to comply with local laws, using VPNs to get around the shutdown faces fines of USD 8,900 daily, and according to X's owner Elon Musk, the social media platform is the country's most used news app and what the people want

French President Emmanuel Macron, who himself uses Telegram, met with the platform's CEO and founder Pavel Durov several times before the Russian was granted French citizenship in 2018 but reportedly failed to convince him to move the headquarters to Paris from Dubai

Germanys federal police, BKA, asks social media platform Gab for the identity of user who wrote that overweight German politician Ricarda Lang is fat, founder and CEO Andrew Torba does not comply with request

Mark Zuckerberg writes in a letter to Congress that Meta in 2021 received repeated pressure from the Biden administration to censor certain content related to covid-19 and that the FBI in the lead up to the 2020 election warned of an upcoming Russian disinformation campaign against the Biden family, which led Meta to censor the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop that Zuckerberg now claims in hindsight was not Russian disinformation

Shareholders of X, formerly Twitter, disclosed and include Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Sean Combs, Bill Ackman, Larry Ellison and Jack Dorsey among many others

The founder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, arrested on Saturday night by French police at an airport outside Paris for not doing enough to prevent criminals from using his platform due to lack of content moderation, for a long time he has had an arrest warrant against him in France

Pakistani Farhan Asif is arrested in the country's capital Lahore on suspicion of cyber terrorism as he is linked to the news aggregator Channel3now which published a false name of the perpetrator of the attack in Southport in the UK that started the recent riots, the British High Commissioner in Islamabad declines to comment on whether the arrest was made at the request of UK

American TV personality Phil Donahue passes away at the age of 88, known for his own show that aired between 1967 and 1996 and for being an early male feminist, hosted guests who were allowed to speak unedited such as Donald Trump, Milton Friedman, Louis Farrakhan, David Duke and Khalid Muhammad as well as Jared Taylor on a show at MSNBC 2002

Elon Musk shuts down the X office in Brazil, citing legal threats against their employees in the country from Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Court if censorship orders are not enforced, the platform is still be available to consumers in the country

Brazilian-Jewish media mogul and one of Brazil's richest men, Silvio Santos, dead aged 93, built SBT, one of the country's three major TV channels, Forbes has compared him to Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva writes on X that he was the country's greatest television personality ever

The 2024 Paris Olympic gold medalist in women's boxing, the Algerian Imane Khelif who, despite his denial, has been accused of being a man, files a lawsuit against the social media platform X to the French authorities regarding cyberbullying, citing J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk

The Falun Gong movement with the media house Epoch Times is taking over the town of Middletown with 30,000 inhabitants in the state of New York in the US, has bought up real estate for 18 million dollars as well as the local shopping center and seems to be wanting to broadening the news business so that now even the local trade brings in income to the movement

Elon Musk interviews Donald Trump on X in connection with the former president's relaunch on the platform, Thierry Breton from the EU threatens Musk in an open letter with legal reprisals before the broadcast if it turns out to be in violation of the EU's regulations, to which Musk replies that Breton should go fuck his own face

YouTube CEO between 2014 and 2023 and one of Google's first employees, Susan Wojcicki, dies of cancer at age 56, earlier this year her 19-year-old died of an overdose in a dorm room at the University of California

The latest issue of the German newspaper Compact, which was recently banned by the decision of the Minister of Justice Nancy Faeser, is published under the name Näncy by the newspaper Demokratischer Widerstand, Compact's editor-in-chief and founder Jürgen Elsässer says he did not participate in the move but welcomes it

US federal judge Amit Mehta rules that Google has a monopoly on certain internet searches and certain internet advertisements and violates the country's antitrust law, in the next step of the process the decision will be made on what that means

Canadian news outlets have lost 43 percent of their engagement on social media overall after Meta's ban on news articles in Canada, in response to Bill C-18, came into force a year ago, three-quarters of the population is unaware of the ban and Canadians are consuming less news

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump does not appear as a suggestion in google searches for assassination attempts on presidents and a search for "president donald" suggests Donald Duck and Donald Reagan but not Trump, the search engine giant itself claims protection in place against political violence but that they are working on improvements

Disney's attempt to dismiss actress Gina Carano's lawsuit has been denied, Carano was fired from the series The Mandalorian on the grounds that she did not align with the company's values after she made social media posts in support of conservative view

Tucker Carlson's podcast overtakes The Joe Rogan Experience as the most popular podcast in the US on Spotify

Media mogul and Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch is in a legal battle to give hos son Lachlan full control of the family's investments even though their trust says control should be split equally between the four oldest children, according to sealed court documents seen by The New York Times

Online publication VDare, focusing on demographic change, identity and immigration, shuts down after 25 years citing investigation by New York District Attorney Leticia James, executive editor Peter Brimelow says she didn't charge them with anything but that she battered them to death with an enormous, ongoing, and intrusive investigation

Italian journalist Giulia Cortese is acquitted of posts in which she compared the country's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to Benito Mussolini, but is sentenced to pay 5,000 euros in damages for making fun of Meloni's height by writing, among other things, "you don’t scare me, Giorgia Meloni, after all, you’re only 1.2 metres tall" and "I can’t even see you"

In the latest expansion of The Sims 4, Lovestruck, the characters can date several characters at the same time, the game takes place in the city of Ciudad Enamorada where, among other things, there are singles bars and gyms and players can search for love themselves via the in-game dating app

Children up to 16 years old who take part in 30 percent or more of their parents' commercially published material must receive financial compensation according to a new law in Illinois in the USA, the money set aside will be accessed by the children when they turn 18

Wikipedia's editors consider the Anti-Defamation League generally unreliable regarding the conflict between Israel and Palestine as well as regarding anti-Semitism and the Jewish lobby organization is added on the list of banned and partially banned sources

Israel's Ministry of Communications along with police raid the news broadcaster Al Jazeera's office in Nazareth and confiscate equipment following the government's decision to end its operations and Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi writes on X that Israel does not intend to allow Hamas to broadcast from within the country

Georgia's parliament votes through a law requiring NGO:s and media operating in the country that have more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register with the state and provide detailed reports on their funding and work, sparking major protests and both the EU and The US condemns police violence against the protesters

Russian-language Wikipedia is shut down in connection with the outbreak of war, and its head Vladimir Medeyko leads the work to create the new version, Ruwiki, by copying all Russian-language articles from Wikipedia and then editing these, for example renaming the article "Russian Invasion of Ukraine" to "Military Actions in Ukraine (in 2022)”

X is ordered by the Federal Court of Australia to remove videos of last week's stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanueli in a Sydney church by Muslim teenager and is now being criticized by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for its refusal and the announcement that they will take it to court

Wikipedia spends more money on left-wing causes than running an encyclopedia, asks its readers for donations but has assets of USD 250 million, donates USD 24 million mostly to the left-wing organization Tides Foundation, which collects anonymous donations to pass on and, among other things, to Knowledge Equity Fund working to work against Eurocentrism and white male imperialist and patriarchal supremacy

Alexandre de Moraes, judge of the Superior Electoral Court of Brazil, starts investigation against Elon Musk who announced that he does not intend to comply with the Brazilian court order to censor accounts on X with a daily fee of almost 20,000 USD per account for failure of censorchip, Musk calls for impeachment or resignation of de Moraes

Sweden deports Chinese journalist Chen Xuefei Axelsson, resident in Sweden for 20 years and has as an editor at Green Post collaborated with Chinese intelligence and worked closely with the Chinese embassy

The Scottish legislation, the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, comes into force on 1st of April, which states, among other things, that it is a crime if a person communicates material to another that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, offensive or insulting and that it is likely to lead to hatred against a specific group

Austrian nationalist activist Martin Sellner gets his account back on X and Elon Musk asks if it's legal in response to his post about him being arrested by police in Switzerland during a speech, last month it was reported that Germany was considering banning the Austrian from entry

The children's channel Nickelodeon employed four now-convicted sex offenders, including Brian Peck who corresponded with serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and several of the child actors now talk about their experiences in the new documentary Quiet on Set, the writer and producer Dan Schneider denies any wrongdoing

Elon Musk cancels planned collaboration with former CNN profile Don Lemon about a new showon the platform after Musk was interviewed in a first episode and that during the negotiation Lemon reportedly demanded a free Tesla Cybertruck, 5 million USD in advance, 8 million USD in salary, shares in X, private flight to Las Vegas and hotel for him and his fiance

Tucker Carlson publishes interview with Mike Benz, CEO of the Foundation For Freedom Online (FFO), which provides a detailed account of the censorship industrial complex, how it was created, why it was created, which agencies and organizations operate it and its key people, and how it was used and is being used for mass censorship and political influence on social media within the US and in the rest of the world, as well as to invert the meaning of democracy

19-year-old Marco Troper, son of YouTube's former CEO Susan Wojcicki and nephew of 23andMe's founder and Sergey Brin's ex-wife Anne Wojcicki, is found dead in a dormitory on the UC Berkeley campus and according to grandmother Esther Wojcicki, he must have inhaled drugs and that they don't know what kind pending toxicology report

X censors accounts related to Indian farmer protests citing legal demands after hashtag #FarmersProtest2024 trends and security in New Delhi is stepped up to stop farmers from entering the capital

Actress Gina Carano, with the financial support of Elon Musk, is suing Disney after she was fired from the Star Wars films citing her social media posts, Carano says she was not considered to be in line with the acceptable narrative of the time and that she was consistently accused of being an alt-right extremist

Tucker Carlson is in Moscow and there are rumors of an upcoming interview with Vladimir Putin, has been seen at the Bolshoi Theater and when asked if he is in the city to interview the president, he replies that we will see

Austrian nationalist activist Martin Sellner's not yet published book Remigration number one on Amazons best sellers list, the e-commerce company will examine the contents as soon as the book is published (German)

Joe Rogan signs new multi-year deal with Spotify but the podcast will be available on more platforms, says he believes podcasts are popular because you get to be a fly on the wall and that it inspires listeners to have similar conversations themselves

Poland's Constitutional Court rules that the new left-wing government's use of commercial laws when it sacked executives of public service companies and then shut them down is unconstitutional, Law and Justice MP Patryk Jaki says all of Tusk's usurpers should leave the buildings immediately, as the minister's actions were illegal

Tucker Carlson visits Julian Assange, who reportedly said the key reason he is in prison is due to WikiLeaks' publication of CIA surveillance, ahead of final appeal against extradition to the US, afterwards Carlson mentions fabricated, media-fueled sexual abuse allegation in Sweden and that it is a total scandal that they are detaining him

The video platform Rumble disables access in Brazil after disagreements with the country following the Supreme Court's demand to deplatform some content creators, CEO Chris Pavlovsky says he will not be bullied by foreign goverment demands for censorship and that users with unpopular views are welcome on the platform on the same terms as other users

Alex Jones gets his account back on X, formerly Twitter, after five years after gaining 70 percent support in poll organized by Elon Musk

Ireland, where many tech companies are headquartered in Europe, is preparing internet regulation called the Online Safety Code, which is said to protect social media users from harmful content, will act as a larger framework that also includes the EU's Digital Services Act and the Terrorist Content Online Regulation

X's CEO Linda Yaccarino writes in a memo that the company's principles do not have a price tag and will not be compromised ever after Elon Musk asked the advertisers who are blackmailing him to go fuck themselves, the platform has expressed that small and medium-sized companies are a significant motor which they believe they have definitely overlooked for a long time

Elon Musk is suing the Washington-based lobbying group Media Matters, which he accuses of misrepresenting the likelihood of ads appearing next to Nazi content on X that was used to pressure advertisers, X CEO Yaccarino says the truth is that not a single authentic user have seen IBM's, Oracle's or Comcast's commercials next to what Media Matters claims

Apple, IBM, Disney and the EU and others stop their ads on X in response to Elon Musk's critical posts against Jewish groups, even Tiktok has been criticized for content sympathetic to Osama bin Laden but unclear if and to what extent they have been boycotted by advertisers

Alex Jones launches the video game New World Order Wars where you play as Jones and meet enemies like Bill Clinton, Mark Zuckerberg and gay frogs

Charlie Warzel: News media has become too cumbersome and a low-margin product that the big social media companies distance itselfs from and traditional news consumption is becoming less important to consumers as trust is down during the last two decades and young people are turning to influencers, creators and podcasts to follow news

The Beatles release the song Now and Then based on the demo John Lennon recorded in 1970 with now improved sound quality thanks to AI, guitars recorded by George Harrison in 1995, as well as newly recorded drums by Ringo Starr and bass, guitar and piano by Paul McCartney that matches Lennon's original recording

Hashtag #StandwithPalestine has been posted 210,000 times on Tiktok since October 16 and gets four times more views compared to #StandwithIsrael which has been posted 17,000 times, the pro-Palestine hashtag is most common in Malaysia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates

Facebook and Instagram launch paid account for those who do not want their data to be sold and receive targeted ads, after EU regulations that say users must give consent to be shown ads, will cost 13 EUR for Android and iOS users

Former British prime minister Boris Johnson will be a presenter at GB News, where Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage work among others, he will have a key role in covering the 2024 UK and US elections

Between September this year and September 2020, the share of traffic from social media to the top news sites has dropped from 11.5 percent to 6.5 percent, X ends headlines from links, Thread's algorithm does not favor news, and Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram generate negligible traffic

British newspapers Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator up for sale after Lloyds bank took over ownership from the Barclays family due to their debts, several stakeholders apart from the Barclay family such as Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere and Sir Paul Marshall, minority owner of GB News

Tucker Carlson takes in USD 15 million from investor Omeed Malik whose investments seek to capitalize on the void created by the left turn of other sources of capital, Carlson, along with his friend Neil Patel, has registered the company Last Country Inc. in Nevada

31-year-old Alan Colie is acquitted after shooting 21-year-old YouTuber Tanner Cook, who pushed a phone in his face in a shopping center in Virginia in the United States, citing that he acted in self-defense, the man behind the account "Classified Goons" testified that he tries to confuse the targets of his pranks for the amusement of his online audience

British conservative news channel GB News suspends presenter Laurence Fox after he wonders what self-respecting man would sleep with journalist Ava Evans during guest apperance at presenter Dan Wootton, who is also suspended, as is presenter Reverend Calvin Robinson, who supported his colleague Wootton

Reddit begins paying users based on certain criteria and no longer gives users the option to decline personalized ads, part of changes to become profitable and possibly go public

Social media platforms are loosening censorship amid layoffs, cost-cutting and pressure from the right, YouTube announced in June that it will no longer delete content alleging fraud, errors and flaws during the 2020 presidential election, and earlier in September the Supreme Court issued a temporary ruling that limit the ability of the Biden administration to contact social media to delete content they don't like

The hashtag #BanTheADL is trending on X/Twitter after the platform's CEO Linda Yaccarino met with the Anti-Defamation League's Jonathan Greenblatt days after Greenblatt's close associate Merrick Garland sued Tesla for hiring Americans before refugees and asylum seekers

Kansas Marion County Record reporter Deb Gruver files federal lawsuit against Police Chief Gideon Cody alleging he and four colleagues' raid on the newspaper that killed 98-year-old owner Joan Meyer violated the reporter's constitutional rights

Guy Goma, who in 2006 ended up live on the BBC after a mix-up and went viral, is suing the British public service company for non-payment of royalties when the clip was played extensively over the years

Former VICE journalists start new media company called 404 Media, write they believe that if they do this journalism well enough, their readers will be willing to subscribe because they think it's important and because they feel they're personally getting value of it

Facebook will offer European users feed free of algorithms and based solely on chronology or local geographic popularity as a result of new EU rules

Netflix announces launch of interactive game based on the series Love Is Blind that involves singles flirting, getting engaged and then getting married, more games to be launched

Swedish radio show Sommar i P1 is uniquely Swedish, this year the radio program had an audience of 1.6 million listeners and becoming a summer talker has been described as the equivalent of knighthood, according to Miranda Bryant in The Guardian

98-year-old Joan Meyer, co-owner of the Kansas newspaper Marion County Records, dies after police raid her and her sons' home and the newspaper's office after obtaining compromising information about local restaurant owner Kari Newell that she claims is illegal, instead of publishing publisher Eric Meyer went with the information to the police

Rupert Murdoch-owned media conglomerate News Corp is slashing its profit by 75 percent, mainly due to falling advertising revenue, but is stressing the potential of artificial intelligence which its Australian operations are already using to produce 3,000 articles a week

German carmaker Porsche apologizes for editing out statue of Jesus in Portugal in commercial filmed in Lisbon, company says it understands the pain it may cause and says that version of ad has been removed

NASA plans to launch streaming service later this year called NASA+, will be free of cost, without ads and will include live coverage of launches, documentaries and new original series

Start-up company Channel 1 News plans to use artificial intelligence to produce personalized news programs with moving images, co-founder Scott Zabielski says that computer generated and real news anchor will definitely become indistinguishable at some point in the future

Competence in artificial intelligence increasingly sought after in Hollywood while actors are on strike, Disney has several open positions, Netflix is ​​looking for a product manager in AI with a salary of USD 900 000 annually and countless positions are available at Apple and Amazon