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"Censorship, or rather his stance against it, is a key reason why Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44bn last year. His social media company's lawsuit against an anti-hate speech group refers to censorship, or variations on the word, eight times. But for critics of his complaint against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), it is Musk who is doing the censoring. "The intent is definitely to get the centre to shut up. That's the whole point of this suit, to prevent the centre from exercising any speech that Musk doesn't like," says Prof Brian Quinn from Boston College law school."

"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."

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

Cory Doctorow article - thought provoking...

"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."

"Critics of the government's flagship internet regulation policy are warning it could lead to a North Korean-style censorship regime, where regulators decide which websites Britons are allowed to visit, because of how broad the proposals are."

"There are concerning stories of censorship and surveillance coming from many countries. Have the stories added up to dramatic authoritarian tendencies, or do they cancel out the benefits of having more and more civic engagement over digital media? Fancier graphic design might help bring home the punchline. There are still no good examples of countries with rapidly growing internet populations and increasingly authoritarian governments."

Software developed to bypass Iranian Internet censorship has been scrapped, due to various reasons.

Software created to help Iranians escape government control of the web has been withdrawn over security fears.

"The US battle with TikTok over data privacy concerns and Chinese influence has been heating up for years, and recent measures have brought college campuses to the forefront - with a number of schools banning the app entirely on campus wifi. Students have responded, of course, on TikTok. Taking advantage of viral sounds, they have expressed outrage at their favourite app being blocked at universities like Auburn, Oklahoma and Texas A&M in the past few months. "Do they not realize people in college are actually adults?" one user wrote. "We should make our own independent decision to use TikTok or not," another said."

"The legal but harmful provisions have become a lightning rod for concerns that the bill will result in an overly censorious approach on social media platforms. Tory MPs including David Davis have argued that the legal but harmful provisions in the bill mean tech firms will "inevitably err on the side of censorship" in how they police their platforms, while Truss has said she wants to "make sure free speech is allowed" when the bill comes back."

"Google has accused Hollywood of attempting to "secretly censor the internet" by reviving the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) to enable wholesale site-blocking."

"Conspiracy theories about Jewish people "controlling the world" are to be explicitly banned from Facebook and Instagram for the first time, after the company announced an update to its content policies on Tuesday. The ban on "certain kinds of implicit hate speech" would also include content depicting blackface, Facebook's vice-president of integrity, Guy Rosen, said."

In her intervention on Friday, the Norwegian prime minister wrote that the photograph, entitled The Terror of War and featuring the naked nine-year-old Kim Phúc running away from a napalm attack, had "shaped world history". Solberg added: "I appreciate the work Facebook and other media do to stop content and pictures showing abuse and violence ... But Facebook is wrong when they censor such images."

"There is no quick technical fix that will protect children - it needs education, responsible parenting and more resources for enforcing the laws that already exist. Dr Martyn Thomas Institution of Engineering and Technology"

"The proponents of the so-called decentralised web - or DWeb - want a new, better web where the entire planet's population can communicate without having to rely on big companies that amass our data for profit and make it easier for governments to conduct surveillance."

"The new policy is a major shift in Twitter's efforts to balance its ideological commitment to free expression with user demands for improved enforcement of rules against harassment, hate speech and other toxic behavior."

" The children's charity NSPCC has called on Facebook to resume a programme that scanned private messages for indications of child abuse, with new data suggesting that almost half of referrals for child sexual abuse material are now falling below the radar. Recent changes to the European commission's e-privacy directive, which are being finalised, require messaging services to follow strict new restrictions on the privacy of message data. Facebook blamed that directive for shutting down the child protection operation, but the children's charity says Facebook has gone too far in reading the law as banning it entirely."

"Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world. "The world needs products like Signal - but they also need Signal to be thoughtful," said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns. "It's not only that Signal doesn't have these policies in place. But they've been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.""

"Facebook has blocked and in some cases banned users who tried to share a Guardian article about the site incorrectly blocking an image of Aboriginal men in chains. On Saturday, Guardian Australia reported that Facebook had apologised for incorrectly preventing an Australian user from sharing the photo from the 1890s."