Facebook Plans New Fight Against Election Misinformation, Bans 'Stop the Steal'

Facebook is planning to enact new measures to make it more difficult for election misinformation to spread virally across its platform, two people with knowledge of the matter said, as the outcome of the presidential race remained uncertain. As part of a heightened campaign against election-related disinformation and calls to violence, the company also took down a new Facebook group, Stop the Steal, which had more than 320,000 members and which Facebook said had been “organized around the delegitimization of the election process,” and that a number of the group’s members had originated calls for real-world violence.

Twitter Removes Tweets from Student Criticizing Proctoring Company

A series of tweets by one Miami University student that were critical of a proctoring software company have been hidden by Twitter after the company filed a copyright takedown notice. Erik Johnson, a student who works as a security researcher on the side, posted a lengthy tweet thread in early September about Proctorio, an Arizona-based software company that several U.S. schools — including his own — use to monitor students who are taking their exams remotely.

Justice Department Seizes $1 Billion of Bitcoin Associated with Silk Road

The U.S. Justice Department announced it had seized over $1 billion worth of bitcoin associated with the underground online marketplace Silk Road. The Justice Department said it was seeking the forfeiture of the cryptocurrency, which had been in the possession of an unnamed hacker who stole them from the “notorious” website. It is the largest cryptocurrency seizure ever made by the U.S. government, the department added.

California Voters Approve Proposition Creating Privacy Protection Agency

A controversial California ballot measure regarding data privacy appears to have been passed by voters in the election, and it is likely to have a national impact by regulating how tech giants based in The Golden State must operate. Proposition 24, known as the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020, seeks to amend and expand on provisions of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that was passed in 2018. The proposition would establish a California Privacy Protection Agency with the power to enforce CCPA, and changes would go into effect in 2023.

Turkey Fines Social Media Platforms for Not Complying with Reporting Law

Turkish authorities have fined Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc. and three other social-media platforms for failing to comply with a new law that civil-rights activists have decried as an attempt to stifle dissent. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Periscope and TikTok have each been fined 10 million Turkish lira, equivalent to $1.2 million, for missing a Nov. 2 deadline to appoint a country representative, Turkey’s deputy minister of transportation and infrastructure, Omer Fatih Sayan, said.

Twitter Suspends Fake Associated Press Accounts Posting Election Results

Twitter Inc. said it permanently suspended several accounts falsely claiming to be tied to the Associated Press after they posted unverified U.S. election results. According to screenshots circulating online and a review of the accounts in question, four accounts were disabled after making calls on the results of an undeclared swing state in the presidential election that the news agency had not made.

Facebook, Twitter Warn Users About Trump's False Claim of Victory

Facebook and Twitter warned social media users that President Donald Trump's claims regarding the election results are potentially misleading, including his claim that he had won the election. After the president falsely claimed in a speech around 2:30 a.m. ET that he had won the race and baselessly alleged fraud on the behalf of his opponents, Facebook labeled a video feed featuring those comments.

YouTube Won't Remove 'Trump Won' Video from One American News Network

YouTube said it won’t remove a video that claims Democrats are committing voter fraud against Republican ballots, despite admitting the video undermines confidence in elections. The video, titled “Trump won” and posted by right-leaning media organization One American News Network on YouTube, shows OAN anchor Christina Bobb saying “President Trump won four more years in the office last night.”

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Twitter Gives 'Misleading' Label to Trump Campaign Official's Voting Tweet

Many of the misleading or false claims about voting have focused on swing states like Pennsylvania, just as they did in the weeks before the election. A Trump campaign official posted an unfounded suggestion on Twitter that Democrats were illegally campaigning at a voting site in Philadelphia. Twitter labeled the tweet “misleading” and later “manipulated,” but it was still shared on the platform nearly 30,000 times, including by the national spokeswoman for the Republican Party and Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona.

U.S. Cyber Command, NSA Take Action Against Iran to Secure Election

U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency have taken recent actions to ensure that foreign actors do not interfere in the 2020 election, including an operation in the past two weeks against Iran, U.S. officials said. The move against Iranian hackers working for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps came shortly after they launched an operation two weeks ago posing as a far-right group to send threatening emails to American voters and also posted a video aimed at driving down confidence in the voting process, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the operation’s sensitivity.

WeChat's Parent Company Seeks to Keep Info Confidential in Suit

WeChat’s parent company, Tencent Holdings Ltd., told a judge it will ask to have confidential business information protected in a lawsuit by users challenging the Trump administration’s ban on the Chinese-owned mobile messaging app. Tencent also said in a filing in San Francisco federal court that it will seek to keep certain unspecified information sealed from public view as the litigation plays out.

Trademark Judge Rules Against Application for '.sucks' Top-Level Domain

The company behind ".Sucks" websites cannot register the term as a trademark, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board said in a precedential ruling Thursday, because consumers view the name merely as a style of web address. The board ruled that the so-called generic top-level domain, or gTLD — which can be appended to any other term to form an address, like lawyers.sucks — did not function as a trademark for selling those addresses.

Despite Curbs, Trump Supporters Face Few Facebook Penalties

In the final months of the presidential campaign, prominent associates of President Trump and conservative groups with vast online followings have flirted with, and frequently crossed, the boundaries set forth by Facebook about the repeated sharing of misinformation. From a pro-Trump super PAC to the president’s eldest son, however, these users have received few penalties, according to an examination of several months of posts and ad spending, as well as internal company documents.

Commerce Department to 'Vigorously Defend' Order Banning TikTok

The U.S Commerce Department said it would “vigorously defend” an executive order that seeks to bar transactions with Chinese-owned short video-sharing app TikTok after a federal judge halted the action. U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone blocked the Commerce Department order set to take effect on Nov. 12 that would have effectively barred ByteDance-owned TikTok from operating in the United States.

Homeland Security Launches 24/7 Cyber War Room for Election Security

The Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division is mounting the largest operation to secure a U.S. election, aiming to prevent a repeat of Russia’s 2016 interference and to ward off new threats posed by Iran and China. On Election Day, DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will launch a 24/7 virtual war room, to which election officials across the nation can dial in at any time to share notes about suspicious activity and work together to respond.

Twitter Unlocks New York Post's Account After Hunter Biden Dispute

The New York Post's Twitter account has been unlocked following a bitter standoff over the outlet's move to share an article about Hunter Biden, with the platform saying it would unlock the account after recently changing its hacked materials policy. The company’s safety account tweeted that it would end its previous practice of “not retroactively overturning prior enforcement,” meaning that “decisions made under policies that are subsequently changed & published can now be appealed if the account at issue is a driver of that change.”

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