Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation)

h/t Dr. Willie Soon, NoTricksZone; The German Research Foundation (DFG) has apologised for censoring a statement that science is not a religious belief system.

The statement by satirist Dieter Nuhr which caused the censorship controversy (source NoTricksZone);

Knowledge does not mean you are 100% sure, but that you have enough facts to have a reasoned opinion. But many people are offended when scientists change their mind: That is normal! Science is just THAT the opinion changes when the facts change. This is because science is not a doctrine of salvation, not a religion that proclaims absolute truths. And those who constantly shout, Follow science! have obviously not understood this. Science does not know everything, but it is the only reasonable knowledge base we have. That is why it is so important.

The apology from DFG;

The DFG expressly regrets having prematurely removed Dieter Nuhrs statement from the website of the online campaign # frdasWissen.Mr. Nuhr is a person who stands in the middle of our society and is committed to science and rational discourse.Even if his pointedness as a satirist may be irritating for some, an institution like the DFG is committed to freedom of thought on the basis of the Enlightenment.We have therefore resumed the contribution.The discussion about the article exemplifies the developments that currently characterize many public discussions about science.

A culture of debate has developed in various areas of our society in which it is often not the factual and stronger argument that counts, in which less listening and inquiries are made, but more and more often hastily judged and condemned.The common dialogue is increasingly being replaced by polarized and polarizing disputes.Especially when it comes to key issues such as climate change or the coronavirus pandemic, the really necessary discussion about scientific topics and the constructive exchange between science and society are hindered.Scientists who make their findings public and describe options for political action are increasingly the target of unobjective attacks and personal defamation.This also applies to social movements

These developments are not beneficial to society and are all the more worrying as science plays a central role in overcoming current challenges, with which it is currently strongly perceived and valued in society.For her part, she is dependent on a critical, open and constructive communication culture.

The DFG would like to use these observations as an opportunity to initiate an intensive examination of the current culture of debate around science.The DFG stands for diversity of opinion and freedom of expression as well as a differentiated culture of discussion.It will continue to do its utmost to achieve this in the future together with other actors from science, media, politics and other areas of society at home and abroad.

Source (Google Translate): https://kaltesonne.de/rolle-rueckwaerts-bei-der-deutschen-forschungsgesellschaft-nuhr-statement-wieder-online/

I applaud the DFG recognising and correcting their error, but such a statement should never have been censored.

I hope this is the start of something bigger, because something has gone very wrong with modern academia. Scientists like Peter Ridd should not be persecuted and punished for taking unfashionable positions. The penalty for speaking your mind if you are a scientist, even if you are later proven to be wrong, should not be excommunication and financial ruin.

If society continues to sanction shooting the messenger (sometimes literally) when it comes to scientists taking unfashionable positions on climate change and Covid-19, politically popular positions will never be properly challenged and reviewed.

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German Analysis Institute Regrets Censorship of a Professional Science Assertion - The Shepherd of the Hills Gazette

This happened yesterday, and it was Trump appearing on Fox News to talk about reopening schools. In it, Trump makes the point that kids are under no particular threat to die or even really get seriously ill from COVID-19. But if you get your news from your Facebook feed you probably didnt see it.

He says theyre almost immune, which scientifically speaking probably isnt quite true, but practically speaking hes right.

Schools across the world have reopened. In Asia and Europe the results have been that the virus hasnt appreciably spread as a result.

And somehow this argument Trump is making is beyond the pale for Facebook?

This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation, a Facebook spokesman told NBC News.

Twitter was even worse. Twitter banned Trumps campaign account from posting until they removed the link to the video.

The @TeamTrump Tweet referenced is in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation, said a spokesperson. The account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again.

Heres the video, which Gab is hosting as a means of sticking it to Facebook and Twitter. Andrew Torba is the CEO of Gab.

The timing on this isnt all that good for Facebook, you know. It was barely a week ago that Mark Zuckerberg and others got called on the carpet by the House Antitrust Committee to talk about their censorship of conservative content on their platforms.

Here was Rep. Jim Jordan giving the chapter-and-verse indictment of Big Tech for its censorship and suppression of conservative thought.

By the way, there is also this, which made no sense

Theres a hashtag on Facebook, #SaveOurChildren, which is dedicated to advocating against child sex trafficking. For some reason Facebook is censoring that along with videos of Trump talking about opening schools and saying kids dont get sick from COVID-19. But kiddie porn, which is illegal, doesnt get censored on Facebook.

Similar examples exist on Twitter.

And these are the oligarchs who control the social media space?

Is anybody else appalled at the hypocrisy and naked cultural aggression here?

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Why Did Facebook Censor This Video Of President Trump? - The Hayride

Donald Trump has hardly covered himself in glory in his latest public responses to the pandemic. His calamitous Axios interview with Australian journalist Jonathan Swan will probably enter the presidential history books for all the wrong reasons.

Nevertheless, the news that Facebook has removed a video of the Presidents latest appearance on Fox News on the grounds that it spreads misinformation about COVID-19 should raise alarm bells in the ears of anyone who cares about free speech. Twitter has similarly frozen a Trump campaign account until the video is removed.

Facebook has taken issue with Trumps comment that children are almost immune from coronavirus. They have labeled this remark as harmful misinformation and therefore taken it upon themselves to ensure that nobody can view the video on their platform.

This heavy handed response is a step up from the platforms previous policy,announced in May, which involved labeling potentially misleading content with a warning. Only when content is in danger of causing imminent physical harm, the policy claimed, should it be removed.

Whether Trumps remarks will cause children to come to imminent physical harm is up for debate. Not only did he qualify his statement with the word almost an admittedly rare moment of restraint the jury is still very much out on the science when it comes to COVID-19 and children. There has not been a single case of a child under 10 passing on coronavirus in contact tracing carried out by the World Health Organization and a study by Britains Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health found the evidence consistently demonstrates reduced infection and infectivity of children in the transmission chain.

Donald Trump was offering an outspoken opinion on an inconclusive topic many will disagree with him but do his remarks really deserve censorship? As with so much of the science behind the pandemic, theres no way yet of knowing for certain whether he was peddling so-called misinformation.

Facebook has plowed more than $1 million into assembling a global army of fact checkers to monitor its content, but, as this decision painfully shows, any assessment of the facts always requires a degree of subjective judgment. Its simply not possible to police content in an entirely objective, apolitical way.

***Get a digital subscription toThe Spectator.Try a month free, then just $3.99 a month***

Misinformation a word that is almost Orwellian in tone is defined so vaguely that it can be applied increasingly liberally to all manner of online content. Heaven forbid that individual users might deploy their own reasoning skills to assess whether the information they are consuming is useful or valuable. Once again consumers are being treated as easily led fools who can only be trusted with news sources that have been vetted on their behalf.

Mark Zuckerberg is still reeling from the drop in share price and advertising revenue that occurred after the Stop Hate for Profit campaign when he refused to censor Trump earlier in the pandemic. Was Facebook waiting for an opportunity to show its contrition? The decision to remove the Fox video smacks more of big corporate PR than it does a genuine defense of the public interest.

By appointing itself as a cultural and political arbiter, Facebook finds itself on a slippery slope. It must wield its power carefully if it doesnt want to hemorrhage users who are tired of being patronized.

This article was originally published on The Spectators UK website.

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Facebook is wrong to censor Donald Trump - The Spectator USA

China has given the internet traffic blocking capabilities a big update and is now using more modern interception technology. This will further strengthen what is known as the The Great Firewall of China as it continues to censor and block content, websites and apps from access by users within China. The update to the censoring tools is believed to be more potent in restricting HTTPS traffic that uses new technologies like TLS 1.3 and ESNI (Encrypted Server Name Indication). This comes as a part of a new joint report published this week by iYouPort, University of Maryland, and the Great Firewall Report. These three organizations have been tracking Chinese censorship on the internet.

We confirm that the Great Firewall (GFW) of China has recently begun blocking ESNIone of the foundational features of TLS 1.3 and HTTPS. We empirically demonstrate what triggers this censorship and how long residual censorship lasts, say the authors of the report. The Transport Layer Security (TLS) standard is the basis of secure HTTPS, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure protocol, which allows users to see who they are communicating with, but no intermediary can snoop in on the information being transmitted. This communication also includes the Server Name Indication (SNI), which Chinese censors will use to detect and block content, websites and apps.

TLS 1.3 introduced Encrypted SNI (ESNI) that, put simply, encrypts the SNI so that intermediaries cannot view it. ESNI has the potential to complicate nation-states abilities to censor HTTPS content; rather than be able to block only connections to specific websites, ESNI would require censors to block all TLS connections to specific servers. We do confirm that this is now happening in China! reveals the report.

Researchers say that the blocking can be triggered bidirectionally, which means a connection from outside China can be blocked by the firewall, as would a connection from a user in China to a destination outside the firewall. There is however a way, researchers say, to circumvent the new-found powers of the firewall. This can be deployed by the client or the server. Geneva (Genetic Evasion) is a genetic algorithm developed by those of us at the University of Maryland that automatically discovers new censorship evasion strategies. Geneva manipulates packet streamsinjecting, altering, fragmenting, and dropping packetsin a manner that bypasses censorship without impacting the original underlying connection, say the researchers. However, they do warn that this tool is a research prototype and does not provide any encryption, protection, data privacy and is not optimized for speed.

Array( [videos] => Array ( ) [query] => https://pubstack.nw18.com/pubsync/v1/api/videos/recommended?source=n18english&channels=5d95e6c378c2f2492e2148a2,5d95e6c778c2f2492e214960&categories=5d95e6d7340a9e4981b2e10a&query=Censor+Content%2Ccensorship%2CChina%2Cencryption%2CESNI&publish_min=2020-08-06T10:27:53.000Z&publish_max=2020-08-09T10:27:53.000Z&sort_by=date-relevance&order_by=0&limit=2)

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China Is Upgrading Its Great Firewall And Can Now Censor Even More Content - News18

TikTok, the famous short-form video-sharing app is in the limelight these days. Especially now that the US government is after it and President Donald Trump has not only suggested imposing a ban on it, he has also given an ultimatum to ByteDance, TikToks parent company, to sell off TikTok to either Microsoft or any other American-based investor before 15th September 2020. If ByteDance fails to do so, then the US operations of ByteDance will stop immediately.

A while ago, in December 2019, ByteDance was alleged with a class-action lawsuit by the US. It was accused of collecting users data and invade their privacy by making them privy to be identified and their data getting misused.

However, there is a fun fact - The user data that TikTok collects is not something new, because other famous American apps do the same, and not only this, tech giants like Facebook have had to face huge scandals because of this issue. So, how can TikTok alone be accused so blatantly for something that its American competitors also do?

Now, with the current issue, Trump has been claiming that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, and the data that it collects from the users can become a cause of national security concern. And that is the reinforcing factor why it should be banned from the US at least.

Sadly, these are the same people who are usually least bothered about the data mining that the American apps are so famous for doing, and this also suggests that maybe Trump is using national security as a cover to apply app censorship policy on a foreign app! Maybe, it is some kind of political posturing rather than genuine care for TikToks users in the US.

App censorship is nothing new. Many countries block apps in the name of national security, or for techno-nationalism so that the users data remains inside and can be used by the companies of that country only, rather than going out and be misused in the other countries. Some countries block foreign apps due to economic reasons too.

So, online censorship is not a novel idea and has been going around since the early '90s. Different democratic and authoritarian governments have been filtering and blocking undesirable or harmful content over the internet.

Now, if Trump is trying to do the same, it means that the US app censorship policy is not so different from what China does already! It also means that while Trump should have enforced better transparency policies from all the tech apps about their content moderation standards and their accountability towards their users, he is busy in using various ploy tactics to ban a foreign app. The US government should have created a new standard for privacy for foreign companies that work within the US borders rather than playing with words and ultimatums!

Read next: Trumps remarks on getting a cut from the sale of TikTok has infuriated the Chinese media as they call it an open robbery

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Trump's stance regarding the ban on TikTok is one of the worst app censorship attempt - Digital Information World

(CNN) -- As scores of American children return to classrooms under the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, free speech experts have bristled at the sight of a public school punishing a student for practicing her right to free speech by sharing a photo of classmates not wearing masks and not social distancing on campus.

This issue became a flashpoint this week after sophomore Hannah Watters was disciplined for posting a photo on Twitter showing many of her fellow North Paulding High School classmates in Dallas, Georgia not wearing masks while walking down a crowded hallway. The photo was posted on Twitter at the end of dismissal, Watters said.

"I took it mostly out of concern and nervousness after seeing the first days of school," she said. "I was concerned for the safety of everyone in that building and everyone in the county because precautions that the CDC and guidelines at the CDC has been telling us for months now weren't being followed."

Watters, who also shared a video showing what dismissal looked like at the end of a school day, was suspended for five days for violating several parts of the school's code of conduct, she said. Those violations included using a cell phone during school hours, using social media during school hours and violating student privacy by photographing them, she said. The school reversed the suspension on Friday; Watters can return to class on Monday, she added.

What happened to Watters can befall other students as the pandemic persists and schools reopen around the US, said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel for the Student Press Law Center. The center is a non-profit organization that works to support and defend the First Amendment and press freedom rights of high school and college journalists and their advisers.

"I've little doubt that these sorts of conflicts are going to dominate my life over the next many months," Hiestand told CNN. "People tend to assume that most censorship issues involving student journalists concern stories about sex, drugs and rock and roll sort of stuff. Not true. By far the most common targets for censorship are accurate, lawful stories that school officials believe cast the school in a negative light. Student stories showing their school's response to Covid has censorship written all over them."

There is no expectation of privacy in a crowded public school hallway, Hiestand said. As such, there's no reasonable claim that these sorts of photos are violating anyone's legal right to privacy, particularly now when the lead headline of many news organizations has to do with students returning to school during a global pandemic, he added.

Watters' photo "is about as newsworthy -- and therefore, non-private -- as it gets," Hiestand said.

The freedom of speech protection afforded by the First Amendment applies to people of any age and, thanks to the Supreme Court, that unequivocally includes students.

The Supreme Court has famously ruled that students do not shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate, and that holds true today as much as it did in 1969, said Roy Gutterman, an attorney and director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University's Newhouse School.

In the case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, the Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that Iowa public school officials had violated the First Amendment rights of several students after suspending them for wearing black armbands protesting the US involvement in Vietnam, according to the Middle Tennessee State University Free Speech Center's website.

The court determined that school officials could not censor student expression unless they can reasonably predict that the expression would cause a substantial disruption of school activities, the center said.

When it comes to cell phones and whether they are a disruption, administrators can impose reasonable restrictions such as not using them during school hours but a principal cannot legally control what students post on social media off campus or after hours, though these attempts are seen from time to time, Gutterman said.

"It would be unreasonable to punish students who are exposing misbehavior or other problems during this public health crisis. If a student exposes something like this, the student is more akin to a whistleblower or public critic and should be praised rather than punished," Gutterman added.

Zach Parsons is a sophomore at North Paulding High School who said it's dangerous for schools to have in-person instruction. He's not wrong, particularly when it comes to students in Georgia.

Four students from three Georgia high schools who attended classes in person this week have tested positive for Covid-19, Columbia County School District Superintendent Sandra Carraway told CNN.

Teachers gathered outside of Gwinnett County Schools this week in their cars honking in protest over reopening schools. As of Wednesday, there were 28 confirmed and 67 suspected cases of Covid-19 among employees of Gwinnett County Public Schools, according to the district. The district has identified 168 close contacts of those people, resulting in a total of 263 employees impacted by either a positive test result or quarantine, it said.

In Georgia's Cherokee County School District, at least 260 students and eight teachers were quarantined after several individuals have tested positive for Covid-19 during the first week of school. The district returned to in-person learning on Aug. 3.

This trend has extended beyond Georgia. Students in Mississippi and Indiana have tested positive for Covid-19 after school districts reopened.

At North Paulding High School, following Watters' photo, around 40% of students were seen wearing masks, Parsons, the student, said. In a letter to the community this week, Paulding County Superintendent Brian Otott said "Wearing a mask is a personal choice, and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them."

For any students concerned about their health and who are facing circumstances like in North Paulding High School, Hiestand of the Student Press center has two words of advice: be brave.

"Use the new speech tools that are available to say what you need to say," Hiestand added. "As John Lewis said a month before he died: 'And to see all of the young people...standing up, speaking up, being prepared to march. They are going to help redeem the soul of America and save our country and maybe help save the planet.'"

The-CNN-Wire & 2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.

Continued here:

Free speech experts call on public schools to not penalize students for sharing images of maskless classmates - ABC 57 News

President Donald Trump's executive order banning American use of WeChat, the most popular app in China, takes effect next month, but some in China are already turning to an American app renowned for its privacy protections.

Downloads for Signal, an encrypted chat app that privacy advocates generally regard as best-in-class for everyday use, are spiking in China, a spokesperson for the app said Friday.

The Chinese government heavily regulates domestic internet use, funneling most of its citizens to WeChat, a multipurpose app that offers messaging, games and ridesharing options, among other uses. On Thursday, Trump, citing the likelihood that WeChat sends users' data to the Chinese government, signed an executive order banning people and companies in the U.S. from engaging in "any transaction" with the app beginning Sept. 20.

It's unclear whether that would require U.S. companies to cut off access to the app, but the order comes as Trump has threatened broad bans on Chinese tech companies operating in the U.S.

China's Great Firewall, a censorship system that restricts citizens from directly visiting much of the internet, bans easy access to most other major Western chat programs. While a comparatively small number of Americans use WeChat, a ban would hamper those who use the app to communicate with friends, family or business associates in China.

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But Signal isn't blocked by the Great Firewall, both for iPhones via the App Store and Android via a direct download from Signal's website, as Google's Play Store is blocked.

"We are actually not banned in China, believe it or not," said Jun Harada, a spokesperson for Signal.

While he declined to share actual download numbers because of a policy of not sharing user data, he said downloads in China began to skyrocket in the hours before Trump's ban. "It's looking to be on par if not bigger than when we made it to #1 in the App Store in Hong Kong," he said, referring to a spike in downloads there last month, when China began implementing its National Security Law, which gave the country broad powers to crack down on protests in Hong Kong.

"We think that has helped us to get more mainstream awareness within China but also with the Chinese diaspora," Harada said.

Signal gets high marks from privacy experts because it stores little information about its users and its messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning a government that accesses them in transit would only see them encoded.

Yaqui Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said she has long used Signal to communicate with people inside China, but cautioned that the government there could move to block it if it catches censors' eyes, making it all the more difficult for people in the U.S. and China to communicate directly.

"Chinese authorities can block Signal if its popularity surges, just as it did to WhatsApp and Telegram," Wang said.

"The bifurcation of the internet, the formation of two paralleled information and communication universes is becoming increasingly evident," she said.

CORRECTION (Aug. 7, 2020, 4:30 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misspelled the first name of a China researcher at Human Rights Watch. She is Yaqui Wang, not Yacqui.

Kevin Collier

Kevin Collier is a cybersecurity reporter based in New York City.

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As Trump bans WeChat, some in China turn to encrypted messaging app Signal - NBC News

The Chinese government is currently using the Great Firewall censorship tool to block certain types of encrypted HTTPS connections.

The block has been in place for more than a week, according to a joint report authored by three organizations tracking Chinese censorship -- iYouPort, the University of Maryland, and the Great Firewall Report.

ZDNet also confirmed the report's findings with two additional sources -- namely members of a US telecommunications provider and an internet exchange point (IXP) -- using instructions provided in a mailing list.

Neither of the two sources wanted their identities and employers named due to China's known habit of direct or indirect reprisals against entities highlighting its internet censorship practices.

Per the report, China's Great Firewall (GFW) is now blocking HTTPS connections set up via the new TLS 1.3 encryption protocol and which use ESNI (Encrypted Server Name Indication).

The reason for the ban is obvious for experts.

HTTPS connections negotiated via TLS 1.3 and ESNI prevent third-party observers from detecting what website a user is attempting to access. This effectively blinds the Chinese government's Great Firewall surveillance tool from seeing what users are doing online.

There is a myth surrounding HTTPS connections that network observers (such as internet service providers) cannot see what users are doing. This is technically incorrect.

While HTTPS connections are encrypted and prevent network observers from viewing/reading the contents of an HTTPS connection, there is a short period before HTTPS connections are established when third-parties can detect to what server the user is connecting.

This is done by looking at the HTTPS connection's SNI (Server Name Indication) field.

In HTTPS connections negotiated via older versions of the TLS protocol (such as TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2), the SNI field is visible in plaintext.

In TLS 1.3, a protocol version launched in 2018, the SNI field can be hidden and encrypted via ESNI.

As the TLS 1.3 protocol is seeing broader adoption today, ESNI usage is increasing as well, and more HTTPS connections are now harder to track for online censorship tools like the GFW.

According to iYouPort, the University of Maryland, and the Great Firewall Report, the Chinese government is currently dropping all HTTPS connections where TLS 1.3 and ESNI is used and temporarily blocking the IP addresses involved in the connection for between two and three minutes -- depending on the location of the Great Firewall where the "unwanted" connection settings are detected.

Luckily for app makers and website operators catering to Chinese audiences, the three organizations said they found six circumvention methods that can be applied client-side (inside apps and software) and four that can be applied server-side (on servers and app backends) to bypass the Great Firewall's current block.

"Unfortunately, these specific strategies may not be a long-term solution: as the cat and mouse game progresses, the Great Firewall will likely to continue to improve its censorship capabilities," the three organizations wrote in their joint report.

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China is now blocking all encrypted HTTPS traffic using TLS 1.3 and ESNI - ZDNet

The US has unveiled a vague but aggressive plan to purge Chinese tech companies from Americas internet, creating what the Trump administration has dubbed the Clean Network the US internet as it currently stands, but minus a lot of Chinese tech.

Its an expansion of the White Houses 5G Clean Path initiative, which was announced earlier this year with the aim of keeping Chinese hardware companies like Huawei and ZTE out of Americas 5G infrastructure. The Clean Network program takes that anti-Chinese impulse and applies it not only to 5G but also telecoms carriers, cloud services, undersea cables, apps, and app stores. It would mean no Chinese apps in US app stores, no US data stored on the Chinese cloud, and no US apps on Chinese smartphones.

Announcing the plan yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said a major aim of the program was to keep American citizens safe from Chinese spies and censorship. In what would be a serious escalation of the administrations current war against TikTok, Pompeo said that under the Clean Program, the US government would remove all untrusted Chinese apps like TikTok and WeChat from American app stores.

With parent companies based in China, apps like TikTok and WeChat and others, are significant threats to personal data of American citizens, not to mention tools for Chinese Communist Party content censorship, said Pompeo in the press briefing, reports CNBC.

But while the Clean Network program is grand in scope, its not clear how or if it can be enforced, especially with the Trump administration distracted by an election challenge in a few months time. Experts say the plan as it currently stands is rhetoric and bluster. There is no technical detail on how the administration might implement the aims it outlines, and theres no reference to the legislative tools that would be needed to make these changes happen.

The specifics dont add up terribly well. They dont speak to a good understanding of how networks function, or a very clear idea of how this is expected to be implemented, Maria Farrell, an independent researcher in international tech policy, told The Verge. That does make it seem like more of a rhetorical exercise.

Although the plan has invited comparisons with Chinas Great Firewall, Farrell says a better comparison might be with Russias approach to internet sovereignty. There, the government has been able to pass some laws in areas like data localization, mandating that data concerning Russian citizens is processed in Russia, but it doesnt have the control or resources that China has to directly oversee and censor the web so extensively.

Russia is mostly talk and no trousers, says Farrell. Compare that to America, which is a bit of talk and no trousers. Theyve got some of the rhetoric but nothing like the machinery you need, either technical or political or legal.

If the Trump administration is determined to push ahead with the Clean Program, though, it could still be hugely disruptive to the global tech industry by leveraging the tools of international trade. It was able to ban Huawei from using Googles software, for example, and could potentially apply those same rules to other Chinese smartphone makers. That could be hugely damaging to these firms, hampering their ability to sell devices in lucrative European markets, for example.

What might be harder to stomach for the White House, though, is the backlash it might receive if it bans not only TikTok but all Chinese-made apps from US app stores. On Twitter, games analyst Daniel Ahmad noted that some of the most popular mobile games in the US, titles like PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty: Mobile, are made by Chinese tech giant Tencent. Tencent also owns Finnish mobile studio Supercell, which makes the hugely popular Clash of Clans. Would that count as a Chinese app and therefore a vector for censorship and spying? The current Clean Network plan offers zero clues on questions like these.

See the rest here:

The White Houses plan to purge Chinese tech from the internet is just bluster for now - The Verge

Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., on Thursday called forTwitter CEO Jack Dorsey to testify before Congress to address allegations of conservative content censorship and political bias.

Fox News spoke with Buck and asked if there were any plans to subpoena Dorsey, based on the fact that he was not present during a House subcommittee hearingwith America's big tech CEOs last month.

"Twitter was notably absent from the big tech hearing last month," Buck told Fox News. "It's time we hear from Jack Dorsey on Twitter's blatant censorship of conservative voices and willingness to protect the Chinese Communist Party's outright lies about the spread of thecoronavirus."

Google's Sundar Pichai, Amazon'sJeff Bezos, Apple'sTim CookandFacebook'sMark Zuckerberghad all been present to give testimony on Capitol Hill. In 2018, Dorsey said his company does not "shadowban" users based on their political beliefs in testimony before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions, whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules. We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our rules impartially, Dorsey said at that time.

Buck's also tweeted about the issueand included a side by side photo of two different headlines from The Hill. One said Twitter would be banning the Trump campaign until it removed a video promoting COVID-19 misinformation -- while the other headline claimed Twitter was allowing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to go unchecked with regard to facts and figures.

REP. KEN BUCK CALLS OUT GOOGLE'S CHINA CONNECTIONS FOLLOWING BIG TECH CEO HEARING ON CAPITOL HILL

"Congress needs to hear from@jack about Twitters clear censorship of conservatives and coziness to the Chinese Communist Party," he tweeted.

Buck has been an outspoken critic of the CCP's tactics and saidthere wasa consensus among both parties that the July hearing revealed nefarious efforts on behalf of big tech, meant tostifle innovation andcompetition within the free marketplace.

"It's absolutely clear that these platforms are using their position to stifle innovation and you hear it from both sides of the aisle," the Colorado Republican told Fox last month. "You hear the CEOs unable to speak to thespecific examples that they are being faced with."

Twitter did not immediately respond to a Fox News request for comment.

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"Theseissues of censorship and bias would not be as big of a deal if Twitter didn't have such monopolistic control over the marketplace," Buck added.

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Rep. Buck wants Twitter's Jack Dorsey to testify about 'censorship of conservatives' and 'cozy' relationshi... - Fox News