After Hong Kong’s leader suggested she may invoke emergency powers that could potentially include limiting Internet access, one of city’s biggest industry groups warned that “any such restrictions, however slight originally, would start the end of the open Internet of Hong Kong.”

While talking to reporters on Tuesday, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam suggested the government may use the Emergency Regulations Ordinance in response to ongoing anti-government demonstrations. The law, which has not been used in more than half a century, would give the government a sweeping array of powers, including the ability to restrict or censor publications and communications. In contrast to China’s “Great Firewall” and routine government censorship of internet services, Hong Kong’s internet is currently open and mostly unrestricted, with the exception of laws to prevent online crime, copyright infringements and the spread of obscene material like child pornography.

In an “urgent statement” addressed to Hong Kong’s Executive Council, the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association (HKISPA) said that because of technology like VPNs, the cloud and cryptographies, the only way to “effectively and meaningfully block any services” would entail putting all of Hong Kong’s internet behind a large-scale surveillance firewall. The association added that this would have huge economic and social consequences and deter international organizations from doing business in Hong Kong.

Furthermore, restricting the internet in Hong Kong would also have implications in the rest of the region, including in mainland China, the HKISPA added. There are currently 18 international cable systems that land, or will land, in Hong Kong, making it a major telecommunications hub. Blocking one application means users will move onto another application, creating a cascading effect that will continue until all of Hong Kong is behind a firewall, the association warned.

In its statement, the HKISPA wrote that “the lifeline of Hong Kong’s Internet industry relies in large part on the open network,” adding “Hong Kong is the largest core node of Asia’s optical fiber network and hosts the biggest Internet exchange in the region, and it is now home to 100+ data centers operated by local and international companies, and it transits 80%+ of traffic for mainland China.”

“All these successes rely on the openness of Hong Kong’s network,” the HKISPA continued. “Such restrictions imposed by executive orders would completely ruin the uniqueness and value of Hong Kong as a telecommunications hub, a pillar of success as an international financial centre.”

The HKISPA urged the government to consult the industry and “society at large” before placing any restrictions in place. “The HKISPA strongly opposes selective blocking of Internet Services without consensus of the community,” it said.

How much of an obligation should social media platforms be under to hunt down illegal content?

An influential advisor to Europe’s top court has taken the view that social media platforms like Facebook can be required to seek out and identify posts that are equivalent to content that an EU court has deemed illegal — such as hate speech or defamation — if the comments have been made by the same user.

Platforms can also be ordered to hunt for identical repostings of the illegal content.

But there should not be an obligation for platforms to identify equivalent defamatory comments that have been posted by any user, with the advocate general opining that such a broad requirement would not ensure a fair balance between the fundamental rights concerned — flagging risks to free expression and free access to information.

“An obligation to identify equivalent information originating from any user would not ensure a fair balance between the fundamental rights concerned. On the one hand, seeking and identifying such information would require costly solutions. On the other hand, the implementation of those solutions would lead to censorship, so that freedom of expression and information might well be systematically restricted.”

We covered this referral to the CJEU last year.

It’s an interesting case that blends questions of hate speech moderation and the limits of robust political speech, given that the original 2016 complaint of defamation was made by the former leader of the Austrian Green Party, Eva Glawischnig.

An Austrian court agreed with Glawischnig that hate speech posts made about her on Facebook were defamatory and ordered the company to remove them. Facebook did so, but only in Austria. Glawischnig challenged its partial takedown and in May 2017 a local appeals court ruled that it must remove both the original posts and any verbatim repostings and do so worldwide, not just in Austria. 

Further legal appeals led to the referral to the CJEU which is being asked to determine where the line should be drawn for similarly defamatory postings, and whether takedowns can be applied globally or only locally.

On the global takedowns point, the advocate general believes that existing EU law does not present an absolute blocker to social media platforms being ordered to remove information worldwide.

“Both the question of the extraterritorial effects of an injunction imposing a removal obligation and the question of the territorial scope of such an obligation should be analysed, in particular, by reference to public and private international law,” runs the non-binding opinion.

Another element relates to the requirement under existing EU law that platforms should not be required to carry out general monitoring of information they store — and specifically whether that directive precludes platforms from being ordered to remove “information equivalent to the information characterised as illegal” when they have been made aware of it by the person concerned, third parties or another source. 

On that, the AG takes the view that the EU’s e-Commerce Directive does not prevent platforms from being ordered to take down equivalent illegal content when it’s been flagged to them by others — writing that, in that case, “the removal obligation does not entail general monitoring of information stored”.

Advocate General Maciej Szpunar’s opinion — which can be read in full here — is not the last word on the matter, with the court still to deliberate and issue its final decision (usually within three to six months of an AG opinion). However advisors to the CJEU are influential and tend to predict which way the court will jump.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment.

CNN’s website is currently blocked in mainland China, after it published a story about today’s 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre as one of its top headlines. The site is usually accessible in China, according to historical data from GreatFire.org.

Matt Rivers, a Beijing-based reporter, noted the blocking of the site on Twitter, writing that “the government here is near obsessive about limiting conversation on this topic.

It appears the Chinese government has begun to block @CNN’s website in mainland China. It’s usually available. Our top story sright now is about the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The government here is near obsessive about limiting conversation on this topic pic.twitter.com/Hjatdko3Gx

— Matt Rivers (@MattRiversCNN) June 4, 2019

Information about the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstration, which ended when the government ordered troops to fire on activists, is suppressed in China, but the country’s censorship apparatus begins intensifying its efforts at eradicating any mention of the events in the weeks leading up to its anniversary each year.

Earlier today, financial information provider Refinitiv also took down Reuters stories related to Tiananmen Square from its Eikon information terminal, following an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the government’s Internet regulation and censorship agency. The CAC told Refinitiv it would suspend its service in China if did not comply with the order.

Even though the stories were only supposed to be blocked in China, Reuters reported today that some users outside of China also said they could not see them, though the reason for that is unclear. (Early versions of the Reuters story about the suspension were themselves removed from Eikon, too).

Singapore has passed a controversial bill that could equip the government with extensive powers to police online media and free speech.

The bill was first drafted last month and, as had been expected, it passed 72-9 in Singapore’s parliament, dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) party, late on Wednesday.

As we reported last month, the bill caused concern through its potential to stifle free speech since a key feature enables the government, and in factor any minister, to force “corrections” to be added to online content that is deemed to be “false.”

Beyond media, the flex also extends to social media. According to the law, those found to be “malicious actors” face a fine of up to SG$50,000 ($37,000) or five years in prison for their content. If posted using “an inauthentic online account or a bot,” the fine jumps to a maximum of SG$100,000 ($74,000) or a potential 10-year jail term. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter face fines of up to SG$1 million ($740,000) for their role in such situations.

Designed to cover “a false statement of fact… has been or is being communicated in Singapore” or cases where politicians believe that issuing a correction is “in the public interest,” the bill also claims reach overseas — or, rather, intended reach overseas. Politicians can trigger it in situations judged to be “in the interest of friendly relations of Singapore with other countries.”

It remains to be seen how much success the Singapore government will have with its efforts. Domestic media may well be under control — the World Press Freedom Index ranks Singapore 151 out of 183 countries and self-censorship is common — but influencing newsrooms based overseas and social networks will likely prove difficult.

Facebook, for example, last November resisted calls to remove content flagged as defamatory by the government. That clearly frustrated officials.

“This shows why we need legislation to protect us from deliberate online falsehoods,” the Ministry of Law wrote in an announcement at the time.

How a takedown would work — and how the government might access encrypted chats on apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, which are also part of its focus — also remains unclear at this point.

The law has been criticized by free speech groups.

“Singapore’s new ‘fake news’ law is a disaster for online expression by ordinary Singaporeans, and a hammer blow against the independence of many online news portals they rely on to get real news about their country beyond the ruling People’s Action Party political filter,” Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Phil Robertson wrote on Twitter.

“Singapore’s leaders have crafted a law that will have a chilling effect on internet freedom throughout Southeast Asia, and likely start a new set of information wars as they try to impose their narrow version of “truth” on the wider world,” he added.

Human Rights Watch — which came out with strong criticism of the bill last month — was criticized by the Singapore government last month which hit back at “its long-standing practice of issuing biased and one-sided statements about Singapore.”

Meanwhile, on the more assistive end of the dissenting voices, the Asia Internet Coalition — a group that represents Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Line and others — penned an editorial in Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper suggesting changes to the bill.

The opinion piece — which, irony alert, is restricted by a paywall — recommended specific processes, an imperial body to vet decisions, exemptions for opinion articles, satire and more, as well as a request for “clear and well-defined language and scope.”

Robertson is concerned that other counties in Southeast Asia will take the ball Singapore has punted and run with it, thereby creating other restrictive online content policies. That’s already happened to some extent. In Vietnam, a draconian cybersecurity law went into operation on January 1 while Thailand passed a controversial law granting a wide scope of powers to authorities in February.

Commenting publicly for the first time about Google’s censored search engine for China, CEO Sundar Pichai said onstage at the WIRED 25 summit in San Francisco that the company is taking “a longer-term view” about the country. Codenamed Project Dragonfly, the controversial development has been public knowledge since a report in August by the Intercept, generating significant backlash, with several employees resigning in protest.

Google did not confirm Project Dragonfly’s existence until its chief privacy officer, Keith Enright, spoke at a Senate hearing last month. Even then, Enright did not provide much information about the project, so this means Pichai’s comments at WIRED 25 are the most detailed ones made officially by Google’s leadership so far.

Even before Project Dragonfly was revealed by The Intercept, Google had already been quietly working on a strategy to re-enter China, including launching (or re-launching) apps through third-party Android stores (Google Play is not available in China) and working with partners like Xiaomi and Huawei to introduce its ARCore technology for augmented and virtual reality there. Pichai said Google has not decided if it will actually launch Project Dragonfly in China, but if it does, the search engine’s biggest competition would be Baidu.

Pichai said that Chinese tech innovations means it’s time for Google to get an understanding of the market from the inside out. “It’s a wonderful, innovative market. We wanted to learn what it would look like if we were in China, so that’s what we built internally,” adding that “given how important the market is and how many users there are, we feel obliged to think hard about this problem and take a longer-term view.”

Even though it follows China’s strict censorship laws, Pichai claimed that Project Dragonfly will still be able to answer “well over 99% of the queries” put to it and that “there are many, many areas where we would provide information better than what’s available.”

Google once operated a censored search engine in China at Google.cn, but pulled out of the country in 2010. At the time, Google said its decision was prompted by a “sophisticated cyber attack originating from China” that targeted human rights activists, and the country’s efforts to “further limit free speech on the web in China” by blocking websites like Googe Docs, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

For its critics, Project Dragonfly’s existence means Google has reneged on the values it avowed nine years ago. While onstage at WIRED 25, however, Pichai said working on a search engine is in line with the company’s mission to “provide information to everyone,” noting that China contains about 20% of the world’s population.

Google only embarked on Project Dragonfly after much deliberation, he said. “People don’t understand fully, but you’re always balancing a set of values” when entering new countries,” adding “but we also follow the rule of law in every country.”

There’s concern for the freedom of the press in Hong Kong after the government declined to renew the visa of a veteran Financial Times’ editor, dealing an alarming blow to the country’s thriving journalism community.

Victor Mallet, the FT’s Asia news editor who is also vice-president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, is effectively being expelled after he was denied a new work visa without reason. The incident follows a controversial FCC event in August, chaired by Mallet, which featured pro-Hong Kong independence activist Andy Chan.

“This is the first time we have encountered this situation in Hong Kong, and we have not been given a reason for the rejection,” an FT spokesperson told HKFP, which was first to report the news.

It is common for the Chinese government to turn down visa renewals for reporters — for example, BuzzFeed’s Megha Rajagopalan had her annual visa rejected last month after she published stories on the plight of China’s Uyghur Muslims — but Hong Kong has long been a bastion of free speech and free press. A range of global media uses the country as their regional HQ for that very reason, while a substantial amount of Chinese reporting is conducted by Hong Kong-based journalists on account of the trickiness of Chinese media visas. Expelling a reporter — and without reason — runs contrary to that.

“This is unprecedented. We expect foreign journalists to have this kind of visa rejection happen in China, but it has never happened in Hong Kong because Hong Kong has a tradition until recent years of respect for free speech,” Human Rights Watch’s Maya Wang told the New York Times.

The situation appears to be a direct response to Chan’s interview at the FCC, which was strongly criticized by the Hong Kong government and China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. Former Hong Kong leader CY Leung went so far as to suggest that the FCC should be forced to give up its lease (which he incorrectly claimed was government-subsidized) while he claimed that hosting Chan was tantamount to giving “criminals and terrorists” air time. His successor Carrie Lim called the FCC event “regrettable and inappropriate.”

Chan’s Hong Kong National party, which pushes back on increased influence from Beijing, was formally outlawed last month. The ban, the first of its kind since the UK handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, was made “in the interests of national security, public order or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”

Google’s lawyers are in Europe’s top court today arguing against applying the region’s so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling globally domains, rather only geo-limiting delistings to European sub-domains (as it does now).

The original rtbf ruling was also a European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision.

Back in 2014 the court ruled search engines must respect Europeans’ privacy rights, and — on request — remove erroneous, irrelevant and/or outdated information about a private citizen.

Google was not at all happy with the judgement, and kicked off a major lobbying effort against it — enlisting help from free speech champions like Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales.

But it also complied with the ruling, after a fashion (after all, it is EU law) — applying delistings on local domains but not across Google.com. Which means there’s a trivial workaround for circumventing EU law.

That has displeased European data protection agencies — who say Google is flouting the law and EU citizens fundamental rights are not being respected. France’s data protection agency challenged Google’s approach. In May 2016 it ordered the company to make delistings global, and fined it €100,000 for non-compliance.

Google appealed and last year the French court decided to refer questions to the ECJ for a ruling on the scope of the delisting — saying it “poses a serious difficulty in interpreting the Law of the European Union”.

And so now we’re back in Europe’s top court with Google’s lawyers arguing against making delistings global — contending it would damage free speech, and enable authoritarian regimes to get stuff they don’t like scrubbed off the Internet.

“We — and a wide range of human rights and media organizations, and others, like Wikimedia — believe that this runs contrary to the basic principles of international law: No one country should be able to impose its rules on the citizens of another country, especially when it comes to linking to lawful content,” wrote Google’s Kent Walker, in 2015. “Adopting such a rule would encourage other countries, including less democratic regimes, to try to impose their values on citizens in the rest of the world.”

The extraterritoriality problem was also chewed over by Google’s self-appointed ‘advisory council’ on the rtbf issue at that time.

And while the majority of this Google-appointed body aligned with Google’s view that there should not be global delistings, there was one dissenting voice: German MP, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who wrote then:  “The internet is global, the protection of the user’s rights must also be global. Any circumvention of these rights must be prevented.”

Google and CNIL declined to comment on today’s hearing.

A second (separate) rtbf case also being heard by the ECJ today concerns whether search engines should have to remove reference to any sensitive personal information about individuals. Which would represent a significant expansion if granted.

However the case is not supported by EU data protection agencies. The individuals bringing the case had their application rejected by CNIL, leading them to pursue a legal appeal.

The key point on this case is that the current right to delist is not absolute; the rtbf only applies to private individuals, not to public figures (e.g. politicians and journalists); and also only applies where the information in question is outdated or irrelevant. So it is bounded and balanced, and absolutely does not apply to every individual and every piece of sensitive personal data.

The current implementation of the rtbf also means Google must review requests, to balance the public right to know against individual privacy rights.

The company actually denies the majority of requests — i.e. when it does not believe a request falls under the scope of the law (Google publishes a Transparency Report on delisting, showing it has, to-date, agreed to delist less than half of requests).

Individuals denied delisting can appeal to a national data protection agency, and indeed challenge a DPA decision in court — as in this case.

But Google’s lawyers said today that only a tiny fraction of rtbf request decisions are every appealed, and further claimed its decisions largely align with DPAs… 

There’s no fixed timeline for the ECJ to hand down a ruling on the two cases but a spokeswoman for the court told us that on average the opinion of the Advocate General comes 2 to 4 months after the hearing, and the Court’s judgment around 3 to 6 months after that. So a court verdict does not look likely before 2019.

Since the 2014 judgement, the EU has doubled down on the rtbf — extending the principle by baking it into its recently updated data protection framework, the GDPR, which gives EU citizens rights to ask data controllers to rectify or delete their personal information, for example.

Reporting the news isn’t illegal, unless you’re in Myanmar. The Southeast Asian country this week sentenced two reporters from Reuters to seven years in jail in response to an investigative report that uncovered atrocities committed against Rohingya Muslims by the army.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, the two Reuters staffers, have been in custody since December. They were arrested for possession of official government documents which had been given to them by a member of the police force as part of the investigation. That puts them in violation of the colonial-time Official Secrets Act which bars civilians from accessing government information.

The landmark decision has been derided worldwide. Critics argue that the Reuters reporters are being made an example of because they surfaced the untold story of an atrocity that involved the military, which controlled Myanmar for nearly 50 years until general elections were introduced in 2015.

The ethnic tension for the Rohingya in Myanmar has gained global awareness in recent years, but less is known about the role that the military has played in both escalated tensions and also through outright atrocities. The Reuters report which the duo contributed to detailed how members of the army, alongside Buddhist villagers, killed 10 Rohingya men in a coastal village.

“Today’s appalling verdict has condemned two innocent men to years behind bars. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo face lengthy jail terms simply because they dared to ask uncomfortable questions about military atrocities in Rakhine State. These convictions must be quashed, and both men immediately and unconditionally released,” Tirana Hassan, Amnesty International’s Director of Crisis Response, said in a statement.

“The outrageous convictions of the Reuters journalists show Myanmar courts’ willingness to muzzle those reporting on military atrocities. These sentences mark a new low for press freedom and further backsliding on rights under Aung San Suu Kyi’s government,” said Bill Adams, Human Rights Watch’s Asia director.

In a rare moment of agreement, members of the House Judiciary Committee from both major political parties agreed that Facebook needed to take down Pages that bullied shooting survivors or called for more violence. The hearing regarding social media filtering practices saw policy staffers from Facebook, Google, and Twitter answering questions, though Facebook absorbed the brunt of the ire. The hearing included Republican Representative Steve King ask “What about converting the large behemoth organizations that we’re talking about here into public utilities?”

The meatiest part of the hearing centered on whether social media platforms should delete accounts of conspiracy theorists and those inciting violence, rather than just removing the offending posts.

The issue has been a huge pain point for Facebook this week after giving vague answers for why it hasn’t deleted known faker Alex Jones’ Infowars Page, and tweeting that “We see Pages on both the left and the right pumping out what they consider opinion or analysis – but others call fake news.” Facebook’s Head of Global Policy Management Monica Bickert today reiterated that “sharing information that is false does not violate our policies.”

As I detailed in this opinion piece, I think the right solution is to quarantine the Pages of Infowars and similar fake newers, preventing their posts or shares of links to their web domain from getting any visibility in the News Feed. But that deleting the Page without instances of it directly inciting violence would make Jones a martyr and strengthen his counterfactual movement. Deletion should be reserved for those that blantantly encourage acts of violence.

Rep Ted Deutch (D-Florida) asked about how Infowars’ claims in YouTube videos that Parkland shooting’s survivors were crisis actors squared with the company’s policy. Google’s Downs explained that “We have a specific policy that says that if you say a well documented violent attack didn’t happen and you use the name or image of the survivors or victims of that attack, that is a malicious attack and it violates our policy.” She noted that YouTube has a ‘three strikes’ policy, it is “demoting low quality content and promoting more authoritative content”, and it’s now showing boxes atop result pages for problematic searches like is the earth flat?’ with facts to dispel conspiracies.

Facebook’s answer was much less clear. Bickert told Deutch that “We do use a strikes model. What that means is that if a Page, or profile, or group is posting content and some of that violates our polices, we always remove the violating posts at a certain point” (emphasis mine). That’s where Facebook became suddenly less transparent.

“It depends on the nature of the content that is violating our policies. At a certain point we would also remove the Page, or the profile, or the group at issue” Bickert continued. Deutch then asked how many strikes conspiracy theorists get. Bickert noted that ‘crisis actors’ claims violate its policy and its removes that content. “And we would continue to remove any violations from the Infowars Page.” But regarding Page-level removals, she got wishy-washy, saying “If they posted sufficient content that it would violated our threshold, then the page would come down. The threshold varies depending on the different types of violations.”

“The Threshold Varies”

Rep Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) gave the conservatives’ side of the same argument, citing two posts by the Facebook Page “Milkshakes Against The Republican Party” that called for violence, including one that saying “Remember the shooting at the Republican baseball game? One of those should happen every week.”

While these posts had been removed, Gaetz asked why the Page hadn’t. Bickert noted that “There’s no place for any calls for violence on Facebook”. Regarding the threshold, she did reveal that “When someone posts an image of child sexual abuse imagery their account will come down right away. There are different thresholds for different violations.” But she repeatedly refused to make a judgement call about whether the Page should be removed until she could review it with her team.

Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Showing surprising alignment in such a fractured political era, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Florida said “I’m agreeing with the chairman about this and I think we arrived at the same exact same place when we were taking about at what threshold does Infowars have their Page taken down after they repeatedly denied the historical reality of massacres of children in public school.”

Facebook can’t rely on a shadowy “the threshold varies” explanation any more. It must outline exactly what types of violations incur not only post removal but strikes against their authors. Perhaps that’s something like ‘one strike for posts of child sexual abuse, three posts for inciting violence, five posts for bullying victims or denying documented tragedies occurred, and unlimited posts of less urgently dangerous false information’.

Whatever the specifics, Facebook needs to provide specifics. Until then, both liberals and conservatives will rightly claim that enforcement is haphazard and opaque.

For more from today’s hearing:

Wikipedia’s Italian and Spanish language versions have temporarily shut off access to their respective versions of the free online encyclopedia in Europe to protest against controversial components of a copyright reform package ahead of a key vote in the EU parliament tomorrow.

The protest follows a vote by the EU parliament’s legal affairs committee last month which backed the reforms — including the two most controversial elements: Article 13, which makes platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users — pushing them towards pre-filtering all content uploads, with all the associated potential chilling effects for free expression; and Article 11, which targets news aggregator business models by creating a neighboring right for snippets of journalistic content — aka ‘the link tax’, as critics dub it.

Visitors to Wikipedia in many parts of the EU (and further afield) are met with a banner which urges them to defend the open Internet against the controversial proposal by calling their MEP to voice their opposition to a measure critics describe as ‘censorship machines’, warning it will “weaken the values, culture and ecosystem on which Wikipedia is based”.

Clicking on a button to ‘call your MEP’ links through to anti-Article 13 campaign website, saveyourinternet.eu, where users can search for the phone number of their MEP and/or send an email to protest against the measure. The initiative is backed by a large coalition of digital and civil rights groups  — including the EFF, the Open Rights Group, and the Center for Democracy & Technology.

In a longer letter to visitors explaining its action, the Spanish Wikipedia community writes that: “If the proposal were approved in its current version, actions such as sharing a news item on social networks or accessing it through a search engine would become more complicated on the Internet; Wikipedia itself would be at risk.”

The Spanish language version of Wikipedia will remain dark throughout the EU parliament vote — which is due to take place at 10 o’clock (UTC) on July 5.

“We want to continue offering an open, free, collaborative and free work with verifiable content. We call on all members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open it up for discussion and to consider the numerous proposals of the Wikimedia movement to protect access to knowledge; among them, the elimination of articles 11 and 13, the extension of the freedom of panorama to the whole EU and the preservation of the public domain,” it adds.

The Italian language version of Wikipedia went dark yesterday.

While the protest banners about the reform are appearing widely across Wikipedia, the decisions to block out encyclopedia content are less widespread — and are being taken by each local community of editors.

As you’d expect, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been a very vocal critic of Article 13 — including lashing out at whoever was in control of the European Commission’s Twitter feed yesterday when they tried to suggest that online encyclopedias will not be affected by the proposal — by suggesting they would not be “considered” to be giving access to “large amounts of unauthorised protected content” by claiming most of their content would fall outside the scope of the law because it’s covered by Creative Commons licenses. (An interpretation of the proposed rules that anti-Article 13 campaigners dispute.)

And the commissioners drafting this portion of the directive do appear to have been mostly intending to regulate YouTube — which has been a target for record industry ire in recent years, over the relatively small royalties paid to artists vs streaming music services.

But critics argue this is a wrongheaded, sledgehammer-to-crack a nut approach to lawmaking — which will have the unintended consequence of damaging free expression and access to information online.

Wales shot back at the EC’s tweet — saying it’s “deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly and misleading the public in this way”.

A little later in the same Twitter thread, as more users had joined the argument, he added: “The Wikipedia community is not so narrow minded as to let the rest of the Internet suffer just because we are big enough that they try to throw us a bone. Justice matters.”

The EU parliament will vote as a whole tomorrow — when we’ll find out whether or not MEPs have been swayed by this latest #SaveYourInternet campaign.

HBO’s Last Week Tonight has led to some drastic measures in China. After an episode aired on June 17th, the Chinese government is now trying to erase all signs of John Oliver on the internet.

The show had a 20-minute segment on Xi Jinping and the Chinese government. In particular, Oliver mentioned Xi’s abolition of term limits and even compared him to Mao Zedong.

Oliver also mentioned torture of political opponents, the infamous experiment to leverage WeChat data to give you a score and determine if you’re a good citizen, Tiananmen Square protests, Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo’s recent death and, yes, online censorship.

It’s a bit ironic that Oliver’s show itself is now censored in China as a result of this episode. It proves Oliver’s point that China still has a long way to go when it comes to human rights and freedom of the press.

Oliver also made sure to mention that Xi doesn’t like to be compared to Winnie the Pooh. Last year, Chinese authorities have banned all mentions of Winnie the Pooh.

According to the New York Times, many posts on social network platform Weibo mentioned John Oliver after the segment aired. Users didn’t specifically talked about the segment — they focused on the host. But now, if you try to write a post that says “John Oliver”, you’ll get an error message.

GreatFire.org also shows that HBO’s website has been blocked since Saturday or Sunday. Unless you have a working VPN or proxy solution, you won’t find Oliver anywhere on the Chinese internet. It’s impressive to see the pace of Chinese censors.

Big tech firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter have expressed major concern after Vietnam’s government passed a law that promises to introduce tighter restrictions on free speech online.

The new regulation passed this week strengthens the government’s position on censoring the internet, drawing Amnesty International to decry that it leaves “no safe place for people to speak freely” in Vietnam. Asia Internet Coalition (AIC) — a group that represents Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Line and others — furthered cautioned that it would harm the development of the country’s digital economy.

Among the broad points, the new cyber security law forbids internet users from organizing with, or training, others for anti-state purposes, spreading false information, and undermining the nation state’s achievements or solidarity, according to reports.

“This decision has potentially devastating consequences for freedom of expression in Vietnam. In the country’s deeply repressive climate, the online space was a relative refuge where people could go to share ideas and opinions with less fear of censure by the authorities,” Amnesty International added in a statement.

Internet censorship isn’t new to Vietnam, but the law increases the state’s potential to act. Concern is already high following a string of arrests over the past year which has seen bloggers jailed for discussing environmental issues, politics and more online.

Beyond limiting free speech, the cyber law also applies pressure to foreign internet companies who will now be required to operate a local office and store user information on Vietnamese soil. Currently, in the case of Google and Facebook, data on Vietnam-based users is stored overseas in locations such as Singapore and Hong Kong.

Google and Facebook both declined to comment, but they are part of the AIC which did make a statement condemning the new law.

“The provisions for data localization, controls on content that affect free speech, and local office requirements will undoubtedly hinder the nation’s fourth Industrial Revolution ambitions to achieve GDP and job growth,” AIC wrote in a statement.

“Unfortunately, these provisions will result in severe limitations on Vietnam’s digital economy, dampening the foreign investment climate and hurting opportunities for local businesses and SMEs to flourish inside and beyond Vietnam,” the organization added.

The people of Vietnam have also voiced their discontent at the new law. Bloomberg reports that demonstrations took place on Sunday ahead of the voting.