Media
Media
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Elon Musk is replacing the Twitter brand with X and says the brand, including the classic blue bird, will be phased out over time, part of his strategy to create a so-called everything app similar to China's Wechat
BBC apologizes to Nigel Farage for falsely reporting that he had his bank account frozen for purely financial reasons without political considerations citing sources, the journalist claims he was misinformed by a source he trusted, the bank Coutts has kept internal records of the political controversies the British politician has been involved in and the views he has expressed
The Associated Press begins collaboration with OpenAI to jointly explore how artificial intelligence can be used in news reporting and production and access to the 1985 archive has been granted, US authorities have begun to examine how the law should handle third-party data in relation to training AI models