Notice in Lumen reveals Indian Government’s attempt to remove references to BBC’s documentary titled ‘India: The Modi Question’ Lumen Team on January 23, 2023 A notice contributed to Lumen by Twitter as a part of Twitter’s transparency efforts revealed that on January 21, 2023, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting sent Twitter an online content blocking order requiring the removal of fifty tweets that discuss ‘India: The Modi Question’, BBC’s recent documentary critical of PM Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat communal riots, where more than 1000 people were killed. Twitter has withheld the tweets in India in response to this request. The order includes tweets made by multiple members of the Indian Parliament, journalists and news channels.
Oligarch's DMCA abuse seems to continue Alana Prinzessin Zu Sayn Wittgenstein on December 22, 2022 This week, I uncovered an additional 21,000+ suspicious-looking notices which seem to be related to the notices I have already identified. They are all putative copyright infringement claims submitted to Google between September 2020 and September 2022, demanding the removal of various articles—the majority of which are associated with the alleged criminal activities of a Russian oligarch
33,000+ DMCA notices sent in an apparent attempt to defend the reputation of an alleged Russian criminal--systematic abuse of the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure Alana Prinzessin Zu Sayn Wittgenstein on December 12, 2022 33,000+ notices, some sent as recently as January 2021, all of which seek the removal of material critical of a controversial Russian oligarch and his alleged criminal activity.
Brazil Court Orders, the Election and the Removal of “Fake News” Alana Prinzessin Zu Sayn Wittgenstein on October 31, 2022 in the run-up ti the October 2022 Brazilian elections, Brazilina courts appear to be being more aggresisve about removing election-related misinformation from socialmedia
Lumen Researcher Interview Series: Ernesto van der Sar of TorrentFreak the Lumen Team on August 18, 2022 Lumen interviews Ernesto van der Sar of TorrentFreak
Stark increase in government takedown requests in Lumen Shreya Tewari on July 19, 2022 In the last few years, journalists, activists, and civil society members have noted that authoritarian national governments are increasingly relying on digital tools to control what information is available to their citizens online. The weaponization of government takedown requests has become a key strategy to meet this goal. Government takedown requests are a legitimate tool for removing illegal online content such as hate speech and terrorist content, but are increasingly being misused to remove lawful government criticism or other types of information that conflict with a governments’ preferred narrative. Some of the most telling evidence of this trend of increasing misuse of government takedown requests has surfaced as a result of Online Service Providers (OSPs), most notably Twitter and Google, being transparent about what information governments have asked them to remove from their services by sharing copies of the governments’ requests and demands with the Lumen database.
Over thirty thousand DMCA notices reveal an organized attempt to abuse copyright law Shreya Tewari on April 22, 2022 Between June 2019 and January 2022, the Lumen Database received copies of almost 34,000 notices that appear to be deliberate fraudulent attempts to misuse the DMCA notice-and-takedown process. In this post, I will discuss certain features of the notice set, including how I assessed them to be fraudulent, the likely motivation behind this abuse of DMCA and the potential impact of such organized takedown attempts.
Transparency initiatives in the DSA: An Exciting Step Forward in Transparency Reporting Shreya Tewari on April 5, 2022 In January 2022, the European Parliament voted in favor of the Digital Services Act (DSA), a horizontal legislation for the EU’s digital single market that seeks to define platforms’ responsibility regarding user content. The draft law also contains several concrete provisions aimed at mitigating certain harms of online advertising, including imposing a ban on ‘dark patterns’ when getting consent from users (Article 13a), a behavior that recently led to the French DPA imposing fines of over $200 million on Facebook and Google. While the DSA seeks to promote a more free internet in numerous ways, this article focuses on its transparency mandates for content moderation decisions and the provisions mandating researcher access to data.
Notice in Lumen reveals that EU mandated removal of Russian state-sponsored news from Google's search engine Shreya Tewari on March 10, 2022 On March 04, 2022, the European Commission sent a content removal request to Google requiring all content by RT and Sputnik, Russian Federation’s State-controlled media outlets, to be de-indexed from Google’s search result. The only reason this one piece of information is available to the public is because Google continues to be transparent about the content removal requests it receives by sharing copies of such notices with the Lumen Database.
Big Tech expresses business-viability concerns in Europe over transatlantic data transfer deadlock Shreya Tewari on February 16, 2022 In its 2021 annual report to the U.S Security and Exchange Commission, released earlier this February, Meta noted that the present lack of a framework regulating transatlantic data transfer between the EU and the United States may leave the organization with no choice but to retract its online services, like Facebook and Instagram, from the region. Google also expressed similar concerns in January 2022, highlighting the “lack of legal stability for international data flows” facing the American and European business ecosystem. These concerns from Meta and Google come on the heels of multiple European Court of Human Rights and Data Protection Commissions rulings in European countries that have, in essence, held all current and existing frameworks for data transfer from Europe to the USA to be in breach of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
