Reddit CEO Says Platform Doesn’t Plan To Ban Pornography

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview that the company supports pornography on its platform, as long as it’s not exploitative. From a report: “You can look at [porn] as exploitative. And, indeed, much of it is. And that’s not the content that we want on Reddit,” Huffman told Axios. “But there’s another aspect that’s empowering. And these are people…

Pornhub Might Lose Visa and Mastercard After NYT Exposé

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Last week, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof detailed the easily-searchable horrors uploaded in plain view onto Pornhub, arguing that the site goes unpunished for profiting from child sex abuse material (CSAM), sexual assault, and nonconsensual pornography (sometimes called “revenge porn.”) Now, Visa and Mastercard claim that they’re reassessing their relationship with the…

‘Extremely Aggressive’ Internet Censorship Spreads In the World’s Democracies

Researchers from the University of Michigan used their own automated censorship tracking system to collect more than 21 billion measurements over 20 months in 221 countries. They discovered that citizens in what are considered the world’s freest countries aren’t safe from internet censorship. From a press release: [Roya Ensafi, U-M assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the…

MSNBC: Parler Does Censor, Removes Users, and Really Hates Trolling

For seekers of a right-leaning free-speech utopia, “Parler may turn out to be, in the end, a false refuge,” warns Marc Ambinder at MSNBC: First — sorry, folks — Parler does censor. It removes users, regularly. It does not actually seem to tolerate hate speech, and because it’s a much smaller platform, it might even be more efficient in finding and…

Body Found In Canada Identified As Neo-Nazi Spam King

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs On Security: The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports. Homicide detectives said they originally…

Is QAnon an 8Chan Game Gone Wrong?

This week London’s prestigious Financial Times published a 15-minute video investigating the question: “Is QAnon a game gone wrong?” In 2017, the Q team, whoever they may be, made use of the modern equivalent of the Playboy’s letters page. It’s a message board called 4Chan… A YouTuber called defango has since claimed the work was his. He says he created Q…

America’s IRS Wants Cryptocurrency Exchanges Declared on Tax Forms

America’s dreaded tax-collecting agency is sending “a strong warning to millions of crypto holders who aren’t complying with the law that they must file required forms,” reports the Wall Street Journal. The front page of this year’s tax forms — just below “Name” and “Address” — will ask filers to declare whether they’ve received or exchanged any virtual currencies. The Journal…

Lord of the Rings Special Effects Company ‘Weta Digital’ Launches Inquiry Into Toxic Workplace Claims

AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: Weta Digital, the special effects company behind the orcs, dragons and battle scenes of the Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, has launched an independent investigation into allegations of a toxic work culture including sexism, bullying and pornography being shared on its intranet. The investigation was ordered by the company’s majority owners, who include…

US Company Faces Backlash After Belarus Uses Its Tech To Block Internet

Senators Dick Durbin and Marco Rubio are criticizing Sandvine Inc., the U.S. company whose technology helped Belarus block much of the internet during a disputed presidental election last month. Bloomberg reports: The private-equity-backed technology firm demonstrated its equipment to a government security team in Belarus in May, two people with knowledge of the matter said, and its marketing materials boast of…