Stories from Abroad

To understand how digital technologies went from instruments for spreading democracy to weapons for attacking it, you have to look beyond the technologies themselves.

[Zeynep Tufekci is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina and a contributing opinion writer at theNew York Times]

[Commentary] First came the scaremongering. Then came the strong-arming. After being contested in arguably the biggest lobbying exercise in the history of the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation became fully applicable at the end of May. Since its passage, there have been great efforts at compliance, which regulators recognize. At the same time, unfortunately, consumers have felt nudged or bullied by companies into agreeing to business as usual. This would appear to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the new law.

Voice of America's Mandarin Service correspondent and a multimedia journalist working for VOA were detained by Chinese police while attempting to interview a retired Chinese professor who was taken away by authorities during a live television interview with VOA nearly two weeks ago. Correspondent Yibing Feng and VOA contractor Allen Ai were taken into custody in Jinan, Shandong province after talking to professor Sun Wenguang, 84, through a closed door of his apartment. Sun told Feng details of his detention and thanked VOA for allowing him to express his freedom of speech on the air.

President Donald Trump has made it official: Government contractors can't buy equipment from Chinese telecoms ZTE or Huawei as part of those contracts, and must submit a plan for phasing out the use of that equipment from its systems. That came with President Trump's signature of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act and after the companies were called out by top US intelligence officials as tied to the Chinese government and thus a national security threat.

President Donald Trump’s anti-press rhetoric is “very close to incitement to violence” that would lead to journalists censoring themselves or being attacked, the outgoing United Nations human rights commissioner has said. Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, a Jordanian prince and diplomat, is stepping down in August as UN high commissioner for human rights after deciding not to stand for a second four-year term, in the face of a waning commitment among world powers to fighting abuses.

The Chinese government certainly has the ability to pursue an online political disinformation campaign directed at foreign elections — but hasn’t yet because it favors long-term thinking over Russia’s scorched-earth foreign policy, experts said. Researchers note that China could turn its sights on the US if it wanted to. “The question for me and some other researchers is: will they make that jump more aggressively to the English language space in the more heavy-handed manipulation sense?

A study of the causal effects of access to high-speed Internet on sleep. Playing video games, using PC or smartphones, watching TV or movies are correlated with shorter sleep duration. The researchers exploit historical differences in pre-existing telephone infrastructure that affected the deployment of high-speed Internet across Germany to identify a source of plausibly exogenous variation in access to broadband. Using this instrumental variable strategy, they find that access to high-speed Internet (DSL) access reduces sleep duration and sleep satisfaction.

An ambitious smart-city project spearheaded by Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs has run into local resistance, causing delays. Waterfront Toronto, a development agency founded by the Canadian government, partnered with the Google sister company in October 2017 to create a futuristic neighborhood on the Toronto waterfront. Sidewalk Labs plans to fill the 12-acre plot with driverless shuttle buses, garbage-toting robots, and other gadgets to show how emerging technologies can improve city life.

Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest. The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official. Teams of programmers and engineers at Google have created a custom Android app, different versions of which have been named “Maotai” and “Longfei.” The app has already been demonstrated to the Chinese gov

Apple has come under fire by Chinese state media, which claims the company isn’t doing enough to block texts and images trafficking in prohibited content including pornography, gambling, and counterfeit goods. China’s state-controlled news agency Xinhua and at least four state-supported media outlets have published criticisms of Apple for not doing enough to filter banned content on its iMessage service.