In response to the passing of the Online News Act by the Canadian Senate, tech giant Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it is preparing to cease the dissemination of news on these platforms within Canada. This decision arises in direct reaction to Bill C-18, a legislative piece that requires tech companies such as Meta and Google to negotiate agreements with news publishers regarding compensation for the usage of their content.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is escalating its battle with the Canadian government over a proposed bill that would require online platforms to pay publishers and broadcasters for hosting their content. In response to the impending legislation, Meta announced that it will conduct tests on its platforms to limit news access for a small percentage of users in Canada.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is once again flexing its muscles and employing a well-known strategy to combat California’s Journalism Preservation Act, a proposal that would require dominant platforms to pay news outlets for the distribution of their content.

Twitter has lost another major media outlet as the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has abandoned the platform following the new tag labeling it as “government-funded media.” PBS joins fellow nonprofit media organization NPR in leaving Twitter over the tag. Twitter defines government-funded media as outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content. The label was originally created to identify tweets from state-controlled news agencies like China’s People’s Daily and Russia’s RT.com, known for circulating government propaganda. However, new Twitter owner Elon Musk expanded the label to NPR and PBS despite their independent status.

And they aren’t just k-i-s-s-i-n-g….. It’s much worse.

What’s being disclosed in the now-weekly Twitter releases certainly doesn’t improve the image of the FBI (and, of course, other 3-letter and 4-letter agencies).

Nasim Najafi Aghdam, the woman who went to YouTube headquarters on Tuesday, April 3rd, and shot three people before killing herself, was clearly and increasingly angry at YouTube for, as she saw it, censoring her and intentionally suppressing her revenue.

The Iranian government has blocked Gmail and Google until further notice. In an announcement, that included sending a notice to citizens via text message, government officials stated that the services would be filtered, and indeed it appears that, while Google is accessible, it doesn’t actually work for searching purposes.

Twitter made a surprising announcement that has the social media world buzzing. They announced that they would be censoring Tweets in certain countries, when requested to do so by officials in the specific country.

Amid a scandalized outcry, Amazon this week stopped selling a book entitled The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover’s Code of Conduct, although they continue to sell an apologist treatise on the same subject. The former, self-published by Phillip Greaves, and the latter, written by David Riegel and published through the interestingly-named Safehaven Press, are at the center of the current tension between freedom of speech, protection of children, and Amazon’s duty, if any, in both.

Germany will be voting tomorrow on their proposed Internet censorship law, which would create a list of verboten websites (primarily dealing with the underaged in inappropriate situations) that will be targeted for official German governmental censoring. It was only a few months ago that Australia’s plan to censor websites that it deemed inappropriate or illegal blew up in its face, with the list of censored website being leaked to and widely published on the Internet.

With just two days until the 20-year anniversary of the horrific massacre at Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government has censored and blocked Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Live.com and Hotmail.com, and even the new Microsoft Bing.com

Last week dozens of thousands of books quietly disappeared from Amazon’s listings and ranking system. What they all had in common was that they had either gay or ‘adult’ themes.

As early as 2007, Facebook began quietly censoring pictures of breastfeeding babies which members had posted to their Facebook profiles. They did this by simply removing the pictures of the nursing babies after they were posted. In some cases, users were warned if they continued posting such “obscene” content, they stood to lose their Facebook accounts. Now the issue is heating up, and Facebook is not backing down. Facebook – you win the booby prize.

The government of Vietnam is getting ready to clamp down on the thriving Vietnamese blogging culture. In fact, the Vietnamese government is putting in place new regulations aimed at curbing just about any form of free speech in Vietnamese blogs. The new regulations, approved this month, include rules that ban all posts that the government feels undermine the national security of Vietnam or that disclose Vietnamese state secrets. The rules, written by the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications, also ban any posts that contain “inaccurate information” that could potentially damage the reputation of individuals and organizations.

Canadian activist group Citizen Lab, with the help of an article in the New York Times, has blown the lid off the newest Chinese censorship scandal: the government of China is eavesdropping on, and in some cases intercepting, text messages sent via the Skype network.