Mission Of July: Save The Internet

Hot summer is ON, and the internet seems to be in the PROTECT mode.

The GDPR and all the recent scandals related to the fake news and users’ privacy infringement seem to have created a particular trend.

At the beginning of July, Twitter has announced its plan to remove questionable accounts from the lists of followers. Twitter’s official account lost the most with close to 13% of its followers being removed.

And that’s not the only effort the company has recently made to “clean up” before the upcoming elections. They went as far as stopping the verification of the accounts to focus on the integrity. 

At Facebook, a fight against misinformation that leads to violence is coming in the form of reviewing posts. The process will include cooperation with special local organizations. As a result, posts that are misleading, inaccurate or were created to cause violence or physical harm are to be taken down.

In the attempt to make the internet a safer place, YouTube has finally terminated the account of Mike and Heather Martin, who were charged with child neglect last fall. Their channel had more than 750k subscribers while depicting various instances of child abuse. Finally, the service now requires all videos featuring children to comply with local child labor laws. (Although it’s good news altogether, we’re kind of interested how the decision corresponds with freedoms that “define” YouTube).

Apart from that, YouTube seems to be getting serious about copyright infringements. It now intends to help creators protect their content. The new Copyright Match tool is designed to find re-uploads. If any content seems to be a copy of yours, you’ll see it in a new Matches tab. After that, you can decide how to approach the situation. It looks like a good idea to give creators the right to choose what to do with the copied content, rather than merely deleting it for infringement.

The PROTECT mode has easily transferred to the mobile environment as Google has decided to ban certain app classes from submission to the Play Store. The list includes applications for cryptocurrency mining, apps related to the sale of weapons, and apps that replicate other apps.

And in case you have forgotten, Google is making sure all the websites finally transfer to HTTPS protocol. As of July, all non-HTTPS sites will be marked as not secure.

And while the “whales” of the internet protect us, no one defends the narwhals. It’s sad.