Civil Rights Groups Encourage Advertisers to Drop Facebook

A coalition of civil rights groups that includes the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League is calling on major advertisers to yank their marketing messages from Facebook in July to protest the social network’s failure to remove hate speech. The campaign, coming as the nation grapples with difficult conversations about systemic racism spurred by the death of George Floyd in police custody, follows years of private discussions with the social media company that activists say resulted in little change.

Zoom Agrees to Add End-to-End Encryption for All Users

Zoom will roll out secure end-to-end encryption for all users — even those who do not pay for the service, reversing course on a previous announcement. The videoconferencing app, which has reported massive growth as people stay at home and work remotely during the coronavirus pandemic, has been skewered for privacy breaches as millions of new users logged on.

Justice Department Releases Recommendations for Limiting Section 230

The Justice Department released recommendations to pare back the legal shield for online platforms that has been crucial to their growth since the earliest days of the Internet, taking a direct shot at companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that have come into the cross hairs of the Trump administration. In a 25-page recommendation, the agency called on lawmakers to repeal parts of a law that has given sites broad immunity from lawsuits for words, images and videos people have posted on their services.

U.S. Withdraws from Negotiations with EU on Digital Services Taxes

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin decided to pull out of negotiations on digital services taxes with European Union officials after they failed to make any progress, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said. Lighthizer told U.S. lawmakers that he still believed an international regime was needed to deal with taxation, but the talks with European countries were not proving fruitful.

Pelosi Urges Advertisers to Pressure Social Media Against Misinformation

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on urged advertisers to pressure social media platforms to tackle misinformation more aggressively. "Advertisers are in a position — they have power — to discourage platforms for amplifying dangerous and even life threatening disinformation," Pelosi said during a George Washington University forum focused on misinformation about the coronavirus on social media.

Facebook, Google, Twitter Executives to Testify on Election Security

Top officials from Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Twitter Inc will appear before U.S. lawmakers at a hearing on foreign influence and election security, the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee announced. The remote hearing will discuss the technology industry’s actions since the 2016 U.S. elections, state-sponsored disinformation efforts, and other related issues as the country moves toward the Nov. 3 presidential contest, the panel said.

Theft of CIA Hacking Tools Blamed on 'Woefully Lax' Security Procedures

The theft of top-secret computer hacking tools from the CIA in 2016 was the result of a workplace culture in which the agency’s elite computer hackers “prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems,” according to an internal report prepared for then-director Mike Pompeo as well as his deputy, Gina Haspel, now the current director. The breach — allegedly by a CIA employee — was discovered a year after it happened, when the information was published by WikiLeaks, in March 2017.

U.S. Charges Six Ex-eBay Employees with Conspiracy to Commit Cyberstalking

Six former eBay employees, including two executives, were charged with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking after allegedly ordering that a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath and roaches be sent to a couple who publish an online newsletter about e-commerce.The Justice Department says the case started in August 2019, when a couple in Natick, Mass., published an article about a lawsuit involving eBay on their e-commerce news site.

Commerce Department Agrees to Lift Restrictions on Business with Huawei

The United States confirmed a Reuters report that it will amend its prohibitions on U.S. companies doing business with China’s Huawei to allow them to work together on setting standards for next-generation 5G networks. The U.S. Commerce Department and other agencies signed off on the rule change, and it is awaiting publication in the Federal Register, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Bezos Willing to Testify on Antitrust Probe at House Judiciary Committee

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, is willing to testify before a House antitrust investigation into the market power of major tech companies alongside other chief executives, a lawyer for Amazon wrote to lawmakers. Amazon had resisted making him available to the House Judiciary Committee, the group overseeing the antitrust investigation, prompting lawmakers to threaten to legally compel Mr. Bezos to testify.

Internet Archive Ends 'National Emergency Library' After Publishers Lawsuit

Internet Archive is ending its program of offering free, unrestricted copies of e-books because of a lawsuit from publishers, which said lending out books without compensation for authors or publishing houses was “willful mass copyright infringement.” Since March, Internet Archive, a nonprofit, has made more than 1.3 million books available online without restriction, calling them a National Emergency Library.

Zuckerberg Says He's 'Disgusted' by Trump's 'Rhetoric' on Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have responded to criticism over Facebook's moderation policies, saying they are "deeply shaken and disgusted by President Trump's divisive and incendiary rhetoric" on the platform. Z uckerberg and Chan were responding to a letter sent out by more than 140 scientists who receive funding through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Amid U.K. Antitrust Probe, Facebook Delays Integration with Giphy

Facebook paused the integration of animated search engine Giphy into its services after United Kingdom regulators opened an antirust investigation into the recent acquisition, according to a source familiar with the matter. The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced it was looking into whether Facebook's move "may be expected to result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services."

California, Washington Investigating Amazon's Business Practices

State investigators in California and Washington have been looking into whether Amazon abuses its power over sellers on the tech giant’s site, according to people involved with the inquiry. In the last several months, California has asked about the company’s private label products and whether it uses data from sellers to inform which products it sells, according to two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution by the company.

EU Planning to File Formal Antitrust Charges Against Amazon

The European Union is planning formal antitrust charges against Amazon.com Inc. over its treatment of third-party sellers, according to people familiar with the matter, expanding the bloc’s efforts to rein in the alleged abuses of power by a handful of large U.S. technology companies. The charges — the EU’s first set of formal antitrust accusations against the company — would be the commission’s latest step in a nearly two-year probe into Amazon’s alleged mistreatment of sellers that use its platform.

Zoom Says China Targets Meetings on Tiananmen Square Anniversary

Zoom Video Communications Inc. said the Chinese government demanded the termination of four public meetings held on its video conferencing platform on June 4 to commemorate the 31st anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown. Zoom said it did not provide any user information or meeting content to the Chinese government and that it would not allow further requests from China to impact users outside the country.

Google Limits Some Ads to Reduce Discrimination in Housing, Jobs, Credit

Alphabet Inc.’s Google said it was tackling unlawful discrimination by barring housing, employment and credit ads from being targeted to its users based on their postal code, gender, age, parental status or marital status. The new policy, which will take effect by the end of the year in the United States and Canada, comes more than a year after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) charged Facebook Inc. for selling discriminatory housing ads and said it was looking into similar concerns about Google and Twitter Inc.

Biden Pushes Facebook to Take Action on Trump's Controversial Posts

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee in November, urged his supporters to petition Facebook to stop disinformation and hold politicians, including President Donald Trump, accountable for spreading lies. The plea from the former vice president marks an escalation of already taut tensions over the company's refusal to remove controversial statements made by Trump that referred to violence against protesters.

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The GigaLaw Firm helps companies of all sizes protect their brands online, using domain name dispute policies – such as the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – and other legal tools available to copyright and trademark owners on the Internet.