Tech

Columbia University announced this week that it is working with Amazon to create a research center for the development of AI technology. The center, which will be based in New York City, will operate for the next five years on a $5 million donation from Amazon.

Netflix is justifying its decision to partner with Chinese novelist Liu Cixin after a group of Republican senators led by Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) demanded the streamer explain why it would do business with someone who has defended China’s abusive treatment of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Voters in four battleground states have filed federal lawsuits to prevent the funneling of millions of dollars from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google, and other tech firms through the Center for Tech and Civic Life which they allege is attempting to influence the outcome of the presidential election.

Researchers say that a tip from a child led them to discover aggressive adware in iOS and Android smartphone apps with a combined 2.4 million downloads across the iPhone App Store and Google Play Store. The malware apps targeted young children and were promoted on social media apps including TikTok.

Facebook has restricted the page of Tucker Carlson, the most popular cable news host in the country, smearing the Fox News host as sharing “false news.”

Actress Jennifer Anniston is pushing a wild attack on America by leftist documentary maker Matthew Cooke who compares in a five minute video Republicans to Nazis.

Last week, Chinese Communist state media were hailing a prospective deal between Chinese company ByteDance, Oracle, and Walmart for control of the TikTok social media platform as a huge win for ByteDance and China, and a crushing defeat for President Donald Trump — The terms of the deal, however, changed a little over the ensuing week, prompting Chinese media to denounce it as “highway robbery” on Friday.

In interviews with Campus Reform this week, students pushed back against President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court of the United States. The problem? President Trump had not selected a replacement at the time of the interviews.

The Senate Commerce Committee plans to vote on October 1 to decide if it should subpoena the CEOs of tech firms including Google, Facebook, and Twitter over their censorship and legal immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA).

This week, YouTube and Zoom pulled the plug on a livestream event hosted by San Francisco State University featuring Leila Khaled, an activist that is best known for her participation in two airplane hijackings that took place in the 1970s. SFSU President Lynn Mahoney argued that that Zoom’s decision to “silence” Khaled is “deeply wounding” to members of the university community.

Amazon recently announced a number of new products at its annual hardware event, including a new Ring security camera drone that flys around your house recording you and your family.

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of video-sharing app TikTok, has requested a temporary block on a ban of the app by the Trump administration. A U.S. judge has now ordered the federal government to defend the ban on Friday afternoon, or delay the blacklisting scheduled for Sunday.

Netflix, which is still dealing with the firestorm from its underage twerking movie “Cuties,” is back in the Congressional hot seat over its partnership with a writer from mainland China who has defended the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Google-owned YouTube has begun stepping up its fight against “misinformation” around the upcoming presidential election by adding information panels and links about candidates ahead of video search results. The Platform is focusing its efforts on the topic of mail-in voting.

The student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison reportedly fired a student this week after he submitted a column in which he pushed back against calls to “defund the police.” Student Tripp Grebe was swiftly removed from his role as a columnist at the paper after the Young America’s Foundation (YAF) questioned the university’s administration over the paper’s refusal to publish the column.

A recent audit conducted by the state of California revealed that the University of California accepted at least 64 students due to their connections to university staff or donors over more qualified applicants. The majority of the applicants chosen for their connections were found at UC Berkeley, which the state auditors accused of failing to “establish a campus culture that values commitment to an admissions process based on fairness and applicants’ merits and achievements.” 

Administrators at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, have refused to condemn a professor that said he is prepared to file a disciplinary report on freshman Nick Sandmann, the Covington Catholic student that found himself at the center of a national media scandal after an encounter with a Native American protester in Washington D.C. in January 2019.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has announced that the first “Bezos Academy,” a free preschool for children from low-income families, will launch in October in a town south of Seattle.

A recent report states that Attorney General William Barr remains unconvinced that a  recently announced partnership between the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok and U.S. companies Oracle and Walmart will safeguard user data from Chinese spying.

A tweet encouraging arson in Louisville, Kentucky, posted a day before violent riots once again broke out across multiple American cities including Louisville, did not violate the Twitter rules, according to a spokeswoman for the tech company.

“Every year, countless Americans are banned, blacklisted, and silenced through arbitrary or malicious enforcement of ever-shifting rules,” Trump said.

The social media giants — Facebook, Google’s YouTube, and Twitter — have, under pressure from the advertising industry, agreed to a set of “common definitions” for allegedly “hateful” and “harmful” content and to “harmonize” reporting standards for such content across the industry.

Just as the corporate media have been smearing Donald Trump since he launched his successful run for the presidency, editors on Wikipedia have done the same. This has included a college professor at the beginning of Trump’s term pushing students to add attacks on the President, editors placing mocking or incendiary articles about him on the site’s front page, equating Trump with the Nazis, and advancing the Russian collusion and Ukraine “quid pro quo” smears that have dominated his Administration.

The Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok recently laid out a partnership with U.S. companies Oracle and Walmart in a deal that has delayed the banning of the app for American users — here are five key facts about the deal currently pending government approval.

Renowned filmmaker Paul Schrader is once again using Facebook to air his hatred of all things Trump — this time, targeting Trump supporters in a wild, hypothetical post in which the writer-director wonders if the MAGA crowd would renounce the president if he called the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg a “cunt,” called Martin Luther King a “ni**er,” or urinated on a Bible.

A recent report from the New York Times states that Facebook has removed fake pages created in China that aimed to influence the U.S. Presidential election.

The Department of Justice will submit a proposal to Congress that would curb big tech’s legal immunity, according to a report released on Wednesday.