Canada still plans to introduce a digital services tax in 2024 despite U.S. opposition, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said.
Freeland, speaking by phone from the Group of 20 finance ministers’ meeting in India, said Canada had already made a “significant concession” in 2020 by agreeing to delay its plan for the new tax.
Three large tax preparation firms sent “extraordinarily sensitive” information on tens of millions of taxpayers to Facebook parent company Meta over the course of at least two years, a group of congressional Democrats reported Wednesday.
Their report urges federal agencies to investigate and potentially go to court over the wealth of information that H&R Block, TaxAct and TaxSlayer shared with the social media giant.
As the Delta variant spread across the US in July 2021, Clarke Humphrey, an official at the White House’s Covid-19 response team, emailed two Facebook executives asking them to take down an Instagram account impersonating Anthony Fauci.
“Hi there – any way we can get this pulled down? It is not actually one of ours,” Humphrey wrote. Less than a minute later, Facebook responded: “Yep, on it!”
Federal Judge Terry A. Doughty issued a temporary injunction on Independence Day blocking members of the Biden administration from having further contact with social media companies during a censorship trial.
How will you get the news now?
That’s a question many Canadians may be asking after tech companies Google and Meta, which owns the social media giants Facebook and Instagram, vowed to remove links to Canadian journalism.
It’s in retaliation for the Online News Act, also known as Bill C-18, that will make them strike agreements with media outlets for “fair compensation” when their news content is shared on the tech companies’ platforms.
I’m not sure this is a bad thing.
OTTAWA—Meta, the tech giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, will soon start blocking the sharing and posting of news content for some Canadians on those platforms as part of a testing strategy that could become permanent — and rolled out nationwide — if Ottawa’s online news bill passes unchanged.
In the coming days, Meta will introduce the tests in preparation for the potential passage of Bill C-18, or the Online News Act, which it opposes.
OTTAWA—Canadian news publishers have shed new light on how journalism in Canada could be harmed if big tech platforms make good on their threats to block the posting of their content, should Ottawa’s online news bill pass unchanged.
Jeff Elgie, the CEO of community news company Village Media, told senators studying the bill that Google and Facebook generate more than 50 per cent of his digital company’s web traffic.
“If that traffic was lost, the business would be over,” said Elgie, whose company owns 25 local news publications across Ontario.
The Supreme Court ruled for Google and Twitter in a pair of closely watched liability cases Thursday, saying families of terrorism victims had not shown the companies helped foster attacks on their loved ones.
“Plaintiffs’ allegations are insufficient to establish that these defendants aided and abetted ISIS in carrying out the relevant attack,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a unanimous decision in the Twitter case. The court adopted similar reasoning in the claim against Google.
If I could show you some of the data that we collected, you would be astounded.
There is a lot more that we can find. The bottom line on this is going to be that the types of monitoring systems that we have been developing since 2016, I am pretty sure at this point that they need to be permanent, large scale, and operating in all 50 states to protect our free-and-fair elections from interference by tech companies, which can flip elections any and all ways they please without anyone knowing.
Tech will always be far ahead of laws and regulations, but monitoring is also tech. If we are monitoring them, we are doing to them what they do to us 24/7.
How the home of big tech lost its way
It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and ‘80s. It was a remarkable center of technology, but also the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism at its very best, as epitomized by garage start-ups like Apple. Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better.
OTTAWA—Facebook and Instagram’s parent company says it will stop making news content available on its platforms if the proposed federal Online News Act passes in its current form.
Meta spokesperson Lisa Laventure says the company made the decision because the act will require it to pay publishers for links or content it doesn’t post.
Laventure says paying for these posts is neither sustainable nor workable for Meta.
An email landed in Andrew Sinclair’s inbox. You’ve just been paid,” it read. Except, he hadn’t. The 51-year-old father of three, head of sales at the New York research firm Quill Intelligence, logged into his bank account and saw that no money had landed.
“My life runs pretty tight, so I look forward to my cheque,” he said.
Confused, he contacted Rippling, the start-up that handles payroll for his employer. Rippling didn’t respond, but on Twitter, he saw Rippling’s chief executive, Parker Conrad, had just tweeted a mea culpa.
More at WSJ – Where Were the Regulators as SVB Crashed?
Silicon Valley Bank’s failure boils down to a simple misstep: It grew too fast using borrowed short-term money from depositors who could ask to be repaid at any time, and invested it in long-term assets that it was unable, or unwilling, to sell.
When interest rates rose quickly, it was saddled with losses that ultimately forced it to try to raise fresh capital, spooking depositors who yanked their funds in two days. The question following the bank’s takeover Friday: How could regulators have allowed it to grow so quickly and take on so much interest-rate risk?
As Congress begins to investigate government interference and Big Tech’s role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, MRC Free Speech America’s exclusive CensorTrack.org database hit another milestone — 5,000 documented cases of censorship
Donald Trump has been unbanned, but Silicon Valley censorship is still a menace to humanity.
I thought I would feel some relief when the social-media giants came to their senses and let Donald Trump back on their platforms. Yet now that it’s happened, now that Meta has decreed that Trump has served his time in the virtual wilderness and may once again post on Facebook and Instagram, I just feel unnerved. Unnerved by the extraordinary power these people wield over who may and who may not engage with the billions of souls who gather online. Unnerved by their supranational authority to grant or rescind a licence to speak in the global town square. Unnerved by the historically unprecedented dominion this small clique of the woke rich enjoys over the liberty to utter.
I suppose back when our technocratic overlords were shadow-banning people, removing or hiding search results, censoring social media, and helping pesky laptops fade into obscurity, they figured they had it made in the shade and were in like Flynn. They must have felt like the future was bright and secure and that their businesses would be lucrative.
