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"My job was to use technology to make the low-level content moderators' work more efficient. For example, we created a tool that allowed them to throw a video clip into our database and search for similar content. When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. The moderators had asked for this because they didn't understand the language. Streamers speaking ethnic languages and dialects that Mandarin-speakers don't understand would receive a warning to switch to Mandarin."

"Jimmy Wales said it was dangerous to have companies decide what should and should not be allowed to appear on the internet. His comments came after the bosses of the leading search engines met the heads of European data watchdogs on Thursday."

"Jack Poulson was a senior research scientist at Google whose work on machine learning work was used to improve Google's search results; now he's quit the company over its Project Dragonfly, a once-secret plan to launch a censored Chinese search engine; Poulson called the move a "forfeiture of our values." Tech companies find it hard to qualify skilled engineers at any price, and machine learning specialists are especially prize, commanding salaries of $1MM/year or more. "

"Microsoft has blamed human error after its search engine, Bing, blocked image and video results for the phrase "tank man" - a reference to the iconic image of a lone protester facing down tanks during the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square - on the 32nd anniversary of the military crackdown. Users reported that no results were shown for the search query in countries including the US, Germany, Singapore, France and Switzerland, according to Reuters and Vice News."

"In some respects, singling out Twitter is unfair: it was a collective failure of social media. People were able to name Edwards as the BBC presenter with impunity in social media comment sections. TikTok suggested Edwards and other BBC presenters' names as "hot" search terms, appending the fire emoji to their names. Google showed news stories and videos about the then-unnamed BBC presenter to people who searched for Huw Edwards' name, connecting him to the scandal."

"Google and Facebook are both fighting against legislation currently before the parliament that would force them to enter into negotiations with news media companies for payment for content, with an arbiter to ultimately decide the payment amount if no agreement can be reached. On Friday, the pair escalated the dispute by threatening to remove the Google search engine from Australia and Facebook to remove news from the Facebook feeds of all Australian users."

"Twitter has been flooded with nuisance posts designed to obscure news of the coronavirus lockdown protests in China, in an apparent state-directed attempt to suppress footage of the demonstrations. Chinese bot accounts - not operated by humans - are being used to flood the social networking service with adverts for sex workers, pornography and gambling when users search for a major city in the country, such as Shanghai or Beijing, using Chinese script."