News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Japanese Lawmakers Eye Ban on TikTok, Others If Used Improperly

A group of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers plans to compile a proposal next month urging the government to ban social networking services such as TikTok if they are used for disinformation campaigns, an LDP lawmaker said on Monday.
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“If it’s verified that an app has been intentionally used by a certain party of a certain country for their influence operations with malice … promptly halting the service should be considered,” Norihiro Nakayama told Reuters in an interview.

“Making it clear that operations can be halted will help keep app operators in check as it means TikTok’s 17 million users [in Japan], for example, will lose their access. It will also lead to sense of security for users,” Nakayama said.

Nakayama, a senior member of a ruling party lawmakers’ group looking into ways to enhance Japan’s economic security, said that proposal will not be targeting at any particular platform.

A string of Western governments and institutions have banned TikTok in recent weeks, including the UK parliament, the Dutch and Belgian administrations, and the New Zealand parliament.

In Japan, the use of TikTok and other social networking services (SNSs) are prohibited on government devices that handle confidential information.

Nakayama said further restrictions should be considered only after looking into their data-handling and other operations.

White House Urged Meta to Censor
WhatsApp Messages to Combat Vaccine Hesitancy

President Joe Biden’s administration pressured Meta to restrict messages on WhatsApp, according to newly disclosed emails.

Rob Flaherty, an assistant to the president, messaged Meta executives in March 2021 to ask about how the company was working to reduce “harm,” one of the emails shows.

“On Whatsapp, which I may seem like I’m playing gotcha, but I guess I’m confused about how you’re measuring reduction of harm,” he wrote in one email. “If you can’t see the message, I’m genuinely curious—how do you know what kinds of messages you’ve cut down on? Assuming you’ve got a good mousetrap here, that’s the kind of info we’re looking for … what interventions you’ve taken, and what you’d found to work and not work?”

“I guess I have the same question here as I do on Facebook on Instagram. Do you guys think you have this under control? You’re obviously going to say yes to that, so I guess the real question is, as ever: how are you measuring success? Reduction in forwarding? Measured impact across Facebook properties?” Flaherty added in another email.
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Flaherty and Andrew Slavitt, at the time a top White House COVID-19 adviser, had been pressuring Meta executives to take action against supposed COVID-19 misinformation, expressing concern that such information—even if true—could lead to vaccine hesitancy.
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A Meta executive responded, informing Flaherty that about 90 percent of the messages sent on WhatsApp are one-on-one, with the rest being sent in group chats. But Meta was taking steps to address alleged misinformation.

...“WhatsApp seeks to control the spread of misinformation and inform users through deliberate, content-agnostic product interventions—things like labeling and limiting message forwards,” the executive said.

“The underlying idea there is that messages that did not originate from a close contact are less personal compared to typical messages sent on WhatsApp, and may be more prone to contain misinformation. The labels (‘forwarded’; and ‘forwarded many times’ if the message has been forwarded five times or more) are intended to prompt people to stop and think when they are reading a message and before they forward something, which may not be accurate. The forward limits (no more than five chats at time; one chat a time for highly forwarded messages), are intended to reduce their spread.”

After the limits on highly forwarded messages were introduced early in the COVID-19 pandemic, those messages were reduced by 70 percent globally, according to the executive.

“Of course, not all forwards are misinformation, so these are by nature somewhat blunt tools, but they are important ones—and ones that many other messaging services don’t provide,” the executive said.

WhatsApp also bans accounts engaged in “mass marketing or scam behaviors,” including accounts “that seek to exploit COVID-19 misinformation,” the executive said.

The executive also touted how WhatsApp has introduced a feature enabling users to tap a magnifying glass button to launch a web search to double-check forwarded messages, the executive said.
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Flaherty claimed that WhatsApp helped “increase skepticism” in the 2020 election and that the U.S. Capitol breach after the election was “plotted, in large part, on your platform.” He asked for “assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again here.”

“Understood. I thought we were doing a better job through [redacted] responding to this."
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The messages were produced during discovery in Missouri v. Biden, a federal lawsuit.