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Google blocks news in some Canadian searches, in response to proposed media law

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A bill under consideration in Canada would require platforms like Google and Meta to negotiate payments with publishers when they link to their content. In response, Google, which opposes the proposed law, is testing blocking news in a small number of searches.

From The Canadian Press on Tuesday evening:

The company said Wednesday that it is temporarily limiting access to news content for under four per cent of its Canadian users as it assesses possible responses to the bill. The change applies to its ubiquitous search engine as well as the Discover feature on Android devices, which carries news and sports stories.

All types of news content are being affected by the test, which will run for about five weeks, the company said. That includes content created by Canadian broadcasters and newspapers.

The tests “limit the visibility of Canadian and international news to varying degrees,” Google told Reuters.

Bill C-18, the Online News Act, is modeled on legislation that passed in Australia in 2021. The bill, which has already passed Canada’s House of Commons and moved on to the Senate, would, among other things, require platforms that “facilitate” access to news — by linking to it in search results, for instance — to compensate the publishers of said news.

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For more background on both sides, we ran a piece last year discussing how the bill could be modified. Our Josh Benton called the law that passed in Australia “a warped system that rewards the wrong things and lies about where the real value in news lies.” The Canadian academic Michael Geist has written extensively criticizing the bill, as has Canadian journalist and former Wikimedia Foundation director Sue Gardner, while David Skok, CEO of Canadian news site The Logic, calls it “a necessary evil in order to maintain balance in Canada’s media ecosystem.”

A spokesperson from the Department of Canadian Heritage, whose minister Pablo Rodriguez is the sponsor of Bill C-18, criticized Google’s action, telling the Globe and Mail, “At the end of the day, all we’re asking the tech giants to do is compensate journalists when they use their work.”

This is not the first time that platforms have tested blocking news in countries where they are under legal threat: The company conducted a similar “experiment” in Australia in January 2021. In February 2021, Facebook temporarily blocked Australian users from sharing or viewing Australian and international news, sending publishers’ traffic tumbling. Facebook parent company Meta has said it’s ready to do the same in Canada.

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Myanmar military dissolves Suu Kyi’s NLD party: State media

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Party of Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi among 40 political parties dissolved after failing to meet registration deadline, according to state television.

Myanmar’s military-controlled election commission has announced that the National League for Democracy Party (NLD) would be dissolved for failing to re-register under a new electoral law, according to state television.

The NLD led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was among 40 political parties dissolved on Tuesday after they failed to meet the ruling military’s registration deadline for an election, according to state television.

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In a nightly news bulletin, Myawaddy TV announced the NLD among those who had not signed up to the election and were therefore automatically disbanded. The NLD has said it would not contest what it calls an illegitimate election.

The army carried out a coup in February 2021 after the NLD won the November 2020 parliamentary elections and subsequently jailed its leader Suu Kyi.

Suu Kyi, 77, is serving prison sentences totaling 33 years after being convicted in a series of politically tainted prosecutions brought by the military. Her supporters say the charges were contrived to keep her from actively taking part in politics.

The party won a landslide victory in the 2020 general election, but less than three months later, the army kept Suu Kyi and all the elected lawmakers from taking their seats in parliament.

The army said justified the coup saying there was a massive poll fraud, though independent election observers did not find any major irregularities.

Some critics of Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who led the takeover and is now Myanmar’s top leader, believe he acted because the vote thwarted his own political ambitions.

No date has been set for the new polls. They had been expected by the end of July, according to the army’s own plans.

But in February, the military announced an unexpected six-month extension of its state of emergency, delaying the possible legal date for holding an election.

It said security could not be assured. The military does not control large swaths of the country, where it faces widespread armed resistance to its rule.

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Gautam Adani acquires 49% in Quintillion Business Media for Rs 48 crore

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Billionaire Gautam Adani’s AMG Media Networks has acquired about a 49 per cent stake in Raghav Bahl-curated digital business news platform Quintillion Business Media Pvt Ltd for about Rs 48 crore.

In a stock exchange filing, Adani Enterprises Ltd said its subsidiary AMG Media Networks Ltd has completed the acquisition which was originally announced in May last year.

The transaction was completed on March 27 for “Rs 47.84 crore”, it said.

Quintillion Business Media runs the news platform Bloomberg Quint, now called BQ Prime.

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Adani group had set up AMG Media Networks for its foray into businesses of “publishing, advertising, broadcasting, distribution of content over different types of media networks”.

In May last year, it had signed a shareholders’ agreement with Quintillion Media Ltd (QML) and QBML.

In September 2021, it hired veteran journalist Sanjay Pugalia to lead its media company Adani Media Ventures.

 

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Twitter source code partially leaked online, court filing says

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GitHub removed code shared without permission after request by social media giant, court filing says.

Twitter’s source code has partially leaked online, according to a legal filing by the social media giant.

Twitter asked GitHub, an online software development platform, to remove the code after it was posted online without permission earlier this month, the legal document filed in the US state of California showed on Sunday.

GitHub complied with Twitter’s request to remove the code after the social media company on March 24 issued a subpoena to identify a user known as “FreeSpeechEnthusiast”, according to the filing with the US District Court of the Northern District of California. San Francisco-based Twitter noted in the filing that the postings infringe on the platform’s intellectual property rights.

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The filing was first reported by The New York Times.

The leak of the code is the latest hiccup at the social media giant since its purchase by Elon Musk, whose tenure has been marked by mass layoffs, outages, sweeping changes to content moderation and heated debate about the proper balance between free speech and online safety.

Musk, who bought Twitter for $44bn last October, said recently that Twitter would open the source code used to recommend tweets on March 31. Musk, who also runs Tesla and several other companies, said the platform’s algorithm was overly complex and predicted people would find “many silly things” once the code was made public. It is not clear if the leaked source relates to the code used to recommend tweets.

“Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality,” he wrote on Twitter. “Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust.”

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