Death of iTunes and Google Cloud Failure
YouTube balances kidvids and creeps / Apple WWDC / China censorship / Facebook ‘no privacy’ / MSO headlines
Julia Alexander: YouTube won’t stop recommending videos with children, despite pedophilia problem
YouTube will not stop recommending videos of young children, despite ongoing concerns that predators are being presented with these videos through the company’s recommendation algorithm.
A new report from The New York Times found that, despite evidence from independent researchers that YouTube’s algorithm helps videos of children spread among predatory circles, YouTube’s teams don’t want to turn off recommendations because it would hurt creators by reducing traffic driven to their videos. Instead, the company will “limit recommendations on videos that it deems as putting children at risk,” the Times writes.
Limiting recommendations is the latest attempt on YouTube’s part to control its pedophilia problem. The company instituted major changes in February when it was first alerted that predators were using the comments section on videos starring children to engage in sexually exploitive conversations. YouTube’s safety team decided to close the comment sections on most videos that star minors.
A new blog post published on Monday from YouTube’s team included additional details about the company’s ongoing strategy to fight predatory behavior. YouTube has reduced the number of predatory comments that appear on videos, disabled live-streaming for minors unless accompanied by an adult, and reduced recommendations for videos that star kids. The company reiterated that it also removes “thousands of accounts per week” that belong to children under the age of 13.
How should Big Tech ensure the safety of minors in an era where families post more and more online? Read More about this story from The Verge.
Engadget: Watch Apple’s WWDC keynote at 1PM ET
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is about to get underway, and there should be plenty of news in store at the opening keynote. We expect to learn details about iOS 13, macOS 10.15, watchOS and more. We might even get a peek at new hardware.
Apple doesn’t officially stream its events on YouTube or other third-party platforms (though you might find unofficial rebroadcasts elsewhere). For the official streams, you’ll need to boot up the Apple TV app or go to Apple’s website. The keynote will start at 1PM Eastern. If you’re unable to watch, we’ll have full coverage of everything you need to know, including on our liveblog.
More about the Apple announcements click through to Engadget’s site.
Catherine Shu: A look at the many ways China suppresses online discourse about the Tiananmen Square protests
Every year before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, the Chinese government begins to exert even more control over what information people can access online. This year is the 30th anniversary of the day the protests ended when the government sent troops to fire on students, activists and other people demonstrating against the Communist Party. Censorship efforts appear to have intensified, potentially affecting even social media accounts outside of China.
From the beginning, the government has tried to control information about the massacre, claiming after the event that 300 people died, though Amnesty International and other international observers said the death toll may have been much higher, potentially numbering into the thousands.
Suppression of information means that an entire generation of people know little about the events, even as the activists involved continue to suffer repercussions, including long prison sentences. In recent years, the government’s censorship apparatus has become even more powerful, with voice and image recognition and machine learning making it easier to block or remove posts at scale. As a content screening employee at Bytedance recently told Reuters, “we sometimes say the artificial intelligence is a scalpel, and the human is a machete.”
This year, one of the most notable examples of the government’s annual crackdown on information began in April, when every language version of Wikipedia was blocked in China, instead of just the Chinese-language version and individual articles about sensitive issues like the Tiananmen Square protests and Tibet.
In May, video-sharing sites Bilibili and AcFun suspended real-time comments, while Douban E Zu (the name translates to “Douban Goose Group”), a popular celebrity gossip and news forum with more than 600,000 members, halted service between May 30 and June 29. Both services claimed they needed to perform “system maintenance.”
Read more about China censorship here at TechCrunch.
Graham Cluley: Facebook lawyer argues you should have ‘no expectation of privacy’
Next time someone connected to Facebook tries to convince you that it’s now really serious about privacy you know they’re pulling your leg.
Read how lawyers are saying that Facebook terms of service mean users agreed to share everything with everyone…on GrahamCLULEY.com
Headlines from DSLreports.com Today
Sen. Chuck Schumer calls on FCC to review New York’s ‘horrible’ internet speeds nypost.com
What Should HBO Cost? The Question Is Giving AT&T Executives a Headache nytimes.com
Elon Musk’s Plan To Dominate Space-Based Broadband ibtimes.com
Georgia officials are creating a detailed map of every location in the state that lacks high-speed internet as they try to expand broadband access in rural areas fresnobee.com
Report: U.S. Mobile Download Speeds Half That of Canada, South Korea Leads the World telecompetitor.com
Could Cable MSOs Buy Some of T-Mobile’s Spectrum? lightreading.com
AT&T adds Locast app to DirecTV, U-verse: The free public service app allows broadband-connected receivers to access local broadcast stations, but is only available in nine markets multichannel.com
Verizon vs. Sprint 5G throwdown: Lightning-fast network speeds are just the beginning cnet.com
Apple to shutter iTunes at Monday’s WWDC event: reports pix11.com
YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail, Discord, and many other web services were down throughout US during a major Google Cloud service outage, now resolved theverge.com
Keep up with all the multichannel news at DSLreports.
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PS: Have a look at this keynote from NSA’s Rob Joyce at CrowdStrike’s security forum.
And check out my opinion column from June 2: Social Media Taxes America
