WASHINGTON U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz set conservative Twitter on fire as he tore into Jack Dorsey, the platforms CEO, during a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, creating the sort of viral moment senators crave from such high-profile exchanges.

Facebook and Twitter and Google have massive power. They have a monopoly on public discourse in the online arena, Cruz told Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whom the Texas Republican and other GOP members of the committee had subpoenaed to address what they view as censorship and suppression by Big Tech during the 2020 election.

Your policies are applied in a partisan and selective manner, Cruz said, demanding that Dorsey and Zuckerberg produce data showing how often they flag or block Republican candidates and elected officials as opposed to Democrats.

What a moment, right-wing commentator Dinesh DSouza tweeted, sharing a clip from the hearing with his 1.9 million followers.

This is almost TOO GOOD, tweeted Dan Bongino, another conservative commentator, urging his 2.7 million followers to Watch Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey absolutely squirm in his chair as Ted Cruz goes full trial lawyer on him.

IN-DEPTH: Cornyn, Cruz not holding out much hope for Trump to pull off re-election

As social media companies cracked down on misinformation during the election under pressure to prevent a repeat of 2016s Russian meddling they found themselves increasingly targeted by conservatives such as Cruz, who call it censorship when Twitter flags President Donald Trumps posts that falsely claim he won re-election, or when Facebook tries to stop its users from sharing a debunked story about President-elect Joe Bidens son.

Its a sign of how an area of bipartisan agreement the need to reform Big Tech has become increasingly politicized, worrying experts that it will be yet another effort mired in congressional bickering.

The fundamental question is what right does a social media platform have to label something posted on it as potentially untrue, said Chris Bronk, an expert in cyber geopolitics who is an associate professor at the University of Houston.

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Bronk said its become increasingly clear that reforms are needed to counter domestic hate groups and hostile foreign governments that use social media to ply the American public with disinformation.

But when the same politicians who regulate the industry are also being flagged for making false or misleading statements, Bronk sees little room for agreement.

I got a tweet this morning at seven whatever, the president put out there and it just said, I won the election. Is that true? said Bronk, a former foreign service officer with the State Department. The internet has allowed us to divorce ourselves from some sets of facts.

The debate centers on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which offers legal protections to online platforms that publish and circulate content created by others.

Cruz, Trump and Biden agree those protections need to go. But the reasons they cite couldnt be further apart.

Democrats such as Biden say social media platforms arent doing enough to combat misinformation and harmful content such as hate speech.

I recognize the steps theyre really baby steps that youve taken so far, and yet destructive, incendiary misinformation is still a scourge on both your platforms, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told Dorsey and Zuckerberg during the committee hearing a proceeding that Blumenthal deemed a political sideshow, a public tarring and feathering.

Republicans, including Cruz, say Twitter and Facebook have already gone too far.

Theyve had unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences, Trump said this year as he signed an executive order targeting the protections in place. Trump said fact-checking attempts by the platforms are one of the greatest dangers (free speech) has faced in American history.

Experts say theres actually little evidence that social media platforms unfairly target those on the right and that available data actually indicates that conservative social media tends to get more traffic online. For instance, the New York Times reported that Trumps official Facebook page got 130 million reactions, shares and comments over a 30-day stretch in the final leg of the presidential race, compared with 18 million for Bidens page.

Trump similarly eclipsed Biden on Instagram, and the gaps on both sites widened as the race came to an end, the Times reported.

Part of the tension on Capitol Hill is the Republicans continue to push this false narrative that tech is anti-conservative, said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has testified before the Senate and advised congressional offices on potential legislation. There is no data to support this. The data that is there is in the other direction and says conservatives dominate social media.

Farid said some important if small steps are being taken. The Judiciary Committee this year passed a bill that would amend Section 230 to allow federal and state claims against platforms hosting content that sexually exploits children.

Farid said the relatively narrow bill targets a very serious problem, but its one of many, many really bad problems on the internet, including hate speech and terrorism. Once those other issues are brought up, Farid said, Republicans start to push back.

Its easy to be supportive of legislation that protects 4-year-olds from being sexually assaulted, Farid said. When it comes to things outside of child sex abuse, the Republicans have a problem, because a lot of their folks live on the side of white supremacists. When we start talking about cracking down on hate speech, they hear Republicans.

But Farid also questioned the wisdom of scrapping Section 230 altogether, as Biden has advocated, and said regulations on the algorithms that platforms use to decide what content gets promoted to their users would be a better approach.

Part of the problem, he said, is that few lawmakers have a deep understanding of the industry, and even some of their more tech-savvy staffers dont seem to have a firm grasp on the issue.

Unfortunately a lot of these hearings are not substantive, Farid said. They are for show. Theyre like flexing muscles.

Cruz, a former Texas solicitor general, was flexing at the hearing with Dorsey and Zuckerberg.

CRUZ STEPS INTO RING WITH TWITTER CEO, HITS HIM WITH 5 LEGALLY DEVASTATING FINISHING MOVES, read the text on a video the conservative Washington Examiner shared, with clips from Cruzs questioning of Dorsey.

In the past, Cruz has called for a criminal investigation into Twitter, accusing the social media company of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran by providing social media accounts to Iranian leaders.

He has urged the top U.S. trade official to scrap language in trade agreements that Cruz said offers near-blanket legal immunity to technology companies.

And he has accused Google of abusing its monopoly power in an effort to censor political speech with which it disagrees.

Cruz, like many Republicans, has also joined Parler, a social media network catering to conservatives.

At the hearing, Cruz vowed to put Twitters policies to the test by tweeting out statements about voter fraud, including findings from the Commission on Federal Election Reform, a bipartisan organization founded in 2004 by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker.

After the hearing, Cruz tweeted to his 4.1 million followers:

Twitter Test #1: Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.

Twitter Test #2: Voter fraud is particularly possible where third party organizations, candidates, and political party activists are involved in handling absentee ballots.

Twitter Test #3: Voter fraud does exist. This is just one example, linking to a news report about a woman charged in Texas.

None of the tweets was flagged.

ben.wermund@chron.com

twitter.com/benjaminew

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Ted Cruz digs in for congressional battle over censorship on Twitter, Facebook - Houston Chronicle

The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of what are considered the worlds freest countries arent safe from internet censorship.

A team from the University of Michigan used its own Censored Planet tool, an automated censorship tracking system launched in 2018, to collect more than 21 billion measurements over 20 months in 221 countries.

We hope that the continued publication of Censored Planet data will enable researchers to continuously monitor the deployment of network interference technologies, track policy changes in censoring nations, and better understand the targets of interference, said Roya Ensafi, U-M assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the development of the tool.

Ensafis team found that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India, Israel and Poland. These countries, the team notes, are rated some of the worlds freest by Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy and human rights.

They were among nine countries where Censored Planet found significant, previously undetected censorship events between August 2018 and April 2020. They also found previously undetected events in Cameroon, Ecuador and Sudan.

While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship. However, Ensafi points out that the groundwork for that has been put in place here.

When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic, she said. The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.

Its already happening abroad, the researchers found.

What we see from our study is that no country is completely free, said Ram Sundara Raman, U-M doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering and first author of the study. Were seeing that many countries start with legislation that compels ISPs to block something thats obviously bad like child pornography or pirated content.

But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and its a very opaque process. Thats why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time.

Norway, for exampletied with Finland and Sweden as the worlds freest country, according to Freedom Housepassed laws requiring ISPs to block some gambling and pornography content beginning in early 2018.

Censored Planet, however, uncovered that ISPs in Norway are imposing what the study calls extremely aggressive blocking across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like Match.com.

Similar tactics show up in other countries, often in the wake of large political events, social unrest or new laws. News sites like The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, for example, were aggressively blocked in Japan when Osaka hosted the G20 international economic summit in June 2019.

News, human rights and government sites saw a censorship spike in Poland after protests in July 2019, and same-sex dating sites were aggressively blocked in India after the country repealed laws against gay sex in September 2018.

The researchers say the findings show the effectiveness of Censored Planets approach, which turns public internet servers into automated sentries that can monitor and report when access to websites is being blocked.

Running continuously, it takes billions of automated measurements and then uses a series of tools and filters to analyze the data and tease out trends.

The study also makes public technical details about the workings of Censored Planet that Raman says will make it easier for other researchers to draw insights from the projects data, and help activists make more informed decisions about where to focus.

Its very important for people who work on circumvention to know exactly whats being censored on which network and what method is being used, Ensafi said. Thats data that Censored Planet can provide, and tech experts can use it to devise circumventions.

Censored Planets constant, automated monitoring is a departure from traditional approaches that rely on volunteers to collect data manually from inside countries.

Manual monitoring can be dangerous, as volunteers may face reprisals from governments. Its limited scope also means that efforts are often focused on countries already known for censorship, enabling nations that are perceived as freer to fly under the radar.

While censorship efforts generally start small, Raman says they could have big implications in a world that is increasingly dependent on the internet for essential communication needs.

We imagine the internet as a global medium where anyone can access any resource, and its supposed to make communication easier, especially across international borders, he said. We find that if this continues, that wont be true anymore. We fear this could lead to a future where every country has a completely different view of the internet.

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Even the world's freest countries aren't safe from internet censorship - Help Net Security

The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of the worlds freest countries are not safe from internet censorship.

A University of Michigan team used Censored Planet, an automated censorship tracking system launched in 2018 by assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science Roya Ensafi, to collect more than 21 billion measurements over 20 months in 221 countries. They will present the findings Nov. 10 at the 2020 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

We hope that the continued publication of Censored Planet data will enable researchers to continuously monitor the deployment of network interference technologies, track policy changes in censoring nations, and better understand the targets of interference, Ensafi said. While Censored Planet does not attribute censorship to a particular entity, we hope that the massive data weve collected can help political and legal scholars determine intent.

Ensafis team found that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India, Israel and Polandcountries which the paper notes are rated as some of the freest in the world by advocacy group Freedom House. They were among nine countries where Censored Planet found significant, previously undetected censorship events between August of 2018 and April of 2020. Previously undetected events were also identified in Cameroon, Ecuador and Sudan.

While the study observed an increase in blocking activity in these countries, most were driven by organizations or internet service providers filtering content. The study did not observe any nationwide censorship policies such as those in China. While the United States saw a smaller uptick in blocking activity, Ensafi points out that the groundwork for such blocking has been put in place in the United States.

When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for internet service providers to interfere with or block internet traffic, Ensafi said. The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.

Its already happening abroad, the study shows.

What we see from our study is that no country is completely free, said Ram Sundara Raman, a PhD candidate in computer science and engineering at U-M and the first author on the paper. Today, many countries start with legislation that compels internet service providers to block something thats obviously bad like child sex abuse material. But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and its usually a very opaque process. Thats why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time.

Norway, for exampletied with Finland and Sweden as the worlds freest country according to Freedom Housepassed a series of laws requiring internet service providers to block some gambling and pornography content, beginning in early 2018. But in Norway, Censored Planets measurements also identified network inconsistencies across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like match.com.

Similar tactics show up in other countries, often in the wake of large political events, social unrest or new laws. While Censored Planet can detect increases in censorship, it cannot identify any direct connection to political events. Its also important to note that its not always government-demanded network censorship that leads to websites being unreachable, though.

Some news websites were blocked in a few networks in Japan during the G20 Summit in June of 2019. News, human rights, and government websites saw a censorship spike in certain networks in Poland while a series of protests occurred in July of 2019, and social media websites were blocked in Sri Lanka after a series of bomb blasts in the country in January 2019. Some online dating websites were blocked in India after the country repealed laws against gay sex in September of 2018.

Roya Ensafi. Image credit: Joseph Xu, Michigan Engineering

The researchers say the findings show the effectiveness of Censored Planets approach, which turns public internet servers across the globe into automated sentries that can monitor and report when access to websites is being blocked. Running continuously, it takes billions of automated measurements and then uses a series of tools and filters to analyze the data, removing noise and teasing out trends.

The paper also makes public technical details about the workings of Censored Planet that Sundara Raman says will make it easier for other researchers to draw insights from the projects data. It will also help activists make more informed decisions about where to focus their efforts.

Its very important for people who work on circumvention to know exactly whats being censored on which network and what method is being used, Ensafi said. Thats data that Censored Planet can provide, and tech experts can use it to devise circumventions for censorship efforts.

Censored Planets constant, automated monitoring is a departure from traditional approaches that rely on volunteers to collect data manually from inside the countries being monitored. Manual monitoring can be dangerous for volunteers, who may face reprisals from governments. The limited scope of these approaches also means that efforts are often focused on countries already known for censorship, enabling nations that are perceived as freer to fly under the radar. While censorship efforts generally start small, Sundara Raman says they could have big implications in a world that is increasingly dependent on the internet for essential communication needs.

We imagine the internet as a global medium where anyone can access any resource, and its supposed to make communication easier, especially across international borders, he said. We find that if this upward trend of increasing censorship continues, that wont be true anymore. We fear this could lead to a future where every country has a completely different view of the internet.

The paper is titled Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory. The research team also included former U-M computer science and engineering student Prerana Shenoy, and Katharina Kohls, an assistant professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. The research was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Award CNS-1755841.

Clarifications:This story has been updated to include additional nuance about the research, including: The names of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post websites were removed from the subhead and the body of the story because the instance of blocking was only observed in one network and may be a case of misconfiguration rather than censorship.

More information:

Read more here:

'Extremely aggressive' internet censorship spreads in the world's democracies - University of Michigan News

The Internets domain name system is not the place to police speech. ICANN, the organization that regulates that system, is legally bound not to act as the Internets speech police, but its legal commitments are riddled with exceptions, and aspiring censors have already used those exceptions in harmful ways. This was one factor that made the failed takeover of the .ORG registry such a dangerous situation. But now, ICANN has an opportunity to curb this abuse and recommit to its narrow mission of keeping the DNS running, by placing firm limits on so-called voluntary public interest commitments (PICs, recently renamed Registry Voluntary Commitments, or RVCs).

For many years, ICANN and the domain name registries it oversees have given mixed messages about their commitments to free speech and to staying within their mission. ICANNs bylaws declare that ICANN shall not regulate (i.e., impose rules and restrictions on) services that use the Internets unique identifiers or the content that such services carry or provide. ICANNs mission, according to its bylaws, is to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems. And ICANN, by its own commitment, shall not act outside its Mission.

Buttheres always a but. The bylaws go on to say that ICANNs agreements with registries (the managing entities of each top-level domain like .com, .org, and .horse) and registrars (the companies you pay to register a domain name for your website) automatically fall within ICANNs legal authority, and are immune from challenge, if they were in place in 2016, or if they do not vary materially from the 2016 versions.

Therein lies the mischief. Since 2013, registries have been allowed to make any commitments they like and write them into their contracts with ICANN. Once theyre written into the contract, they become enforceable by ICANN. These voluntary public interest commitments have included many promises made to powerful business interests that work against the rights of domain name users. For example, one registry operator puts the interests of major brands over those of its actual customers by allowing trademark holders to stop anyone else from registering domains that contain common words they claim as brands.

Further, at least one registry has granted itself sole discretion and at any time and without limitation, to deny, suspend, cancel, or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold, or similar status for vague and undefined reasons, without notice to the registrant and without any opportunity to respond. This rule applies across potentially millions of domain names. How can anyone feel secure that the domain name they use for their website or app wont suddenly be shut down? With such arbitrary policies in place, why would anyone trust the domain name system with their valued speech, expression, education, research, and commerce?

Voluntary PICs even played a role in the failed takeover of the .ORG registry earlier this year by the private equity firm Ethos Capital, which is run by former ICANN insiders. When EFF and thousands of other organizations sounded the alarm over private investors bid for control over the speech of nonprofit organizations, Ethos Capital proposed to write PICs that, according to them, would prevent censorship. Of course, because the clauses Ethos proposed to add to its contract were written by the firm alone, without any meaningful community input, they had more holes than Swiss cheese. If the sale had succeeded, ICANN would have been bound to enforce Ethoss weak and self-serving version of anti-censorship.

The issue of PICs is now up for review by an ICANN working group known as Subsequent Procedures. Last month, the ICANN Board wrote an open letter to that group expressing concern about PICs that might entangle ICANN in issues that fall outside of ICANNs technical mission. It bears repeating that the one thing explicitly called out in ICANNs bylaws as being outside of ICANNs mission is to regulate Internet services or the content that such services carry or provide. The Board asked the working group [pdf] for guidance on how to utilize PICs and RVCs without the need for ICANN to assess and pass judgment on content.

EFF supports this request, and so do many other organizations and stakeholders who dont want to see ICANN become another content moderation battleground. Theres a simple, three-part solution that the Subsequent Procedures working group can propose:

In short, while registries can run their businesses as they see fit, ICANNs contracts and enforcement systems should have no role in content regulation, or any other rules and policies beyond the ones the ICANN Community has made together.

A guardrail on the PIC/RVC process will keep ICANN true to its promise not to regulate Internet services and content.It will help avoid another situation like the failed .ORG takeover, by sending a message that censorship-for-profit is against ICANNs principles. It will also help registry operators to resist calls for censorship by governments (for example, calls to suppress truthful information about the importation of prescription medicines). This will preserve Internet users trust in the domain name system.

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ICANN Can Stand Against Censorship (And Avoid Another .ORG Debacle) by Keeping Content Regulation and Other Dangerous Policies Out of Its Registry...

Global internet companies Facebook, Google and Twitter and others have banded together and threatened to leave Pakistan after the South Asian nation granted blanket powers to local regulators to censor digital content.

Earlier this week, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan granted the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority the power to remove and block digital content that pose harms, intimidates or excites disaffection toward the government or in other ways hurt the integrity, security, and defence of Pakistan.

Through a group called the Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), the tech firms said that they were alarmed by the scope of Pakistans new law targeting internet firms. In addition to Facebook, Google and Twitter, AIC represents Apple, Amazon, LinkedIn, SAP, Expedia Group, Yahoo, Airbnb, Grab, Rakuten, Booking.com, Line and Cloudflare.

If the message sounds familiar, its because this is not the first time these tech giants have publicly expressed their concerns over the new law, which was proposed by Khans ministry in February this year.

After the Pakistani government made the proposal earlier this year, the group had threatened to leave, a move that made the nation retreat and promise an extensive and broad-based consultation process with civil society and tech companies.

That consultation never happened, AIC said in a statement on Thursday, reiterating that its members will be unable to operate in the country with this law in place.

The draconian data localization requirements will damage the ability of people to access a free and open internet and shut Pakistans digital economy off from the rest of the world. Its chilling to see the PTAs powers expanded, allowing them to force social media companies to violate established human rights norms on privacy and freedom of expression, the group said in a statement.

The Rules would make it extremely difficult for AIC Members to make their services available to Pakistani users and businesses. If Pakistan wants to be an attractive destination for technology investment and realise its goal of digital transformation, we urge the Government to work with industry on practical, clear rules that protect the benefits of the internet and keep people safe from harm.

Under the new law, tech companies that fail to remove or block the unlawful content from their platforms within 24 hours of notice from Pakistan authorities also face a fine of up to $3.14 million. And like its neighboring nation, India which has also proposed a similar regulation with little to no backlash Pakistan now also requires these companies to have local offices in the country.

The new rules comes as Pakistan has cracked down on what it deems to be inappropriate content on the internet in recent months. Earlier this year, it banned popular mobile game PUBG Mobile and last month it temporarily blocked TikTok.

Countries like Pakistan and India contribute little to the bottom line for tech companies. But India, which has proposed several protectionist laws in recent years, has largely escaped any major protest from global tech companies because of its size. Pakistan has about 75 million internet users.

By contrast, India is the biggest market for Google and Facebook by users. Silicon Valley companies love to come to India because its an MAU (monthly active users) farm, Kunal Shah, a veteran entrepreneur, said in a conference in 2018.

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Google, Facebook and Twitter threaten to leave Pakistan over censorship law - TechCrunch