Facebook Inc on Friday removed the pages of U.S. right-wing group Patriot Prayer and its founder Joey Gibson, a company spokesman told Reuters.Patriot Prayer has hosted dozens of pro-gun, pro-Trump rallies. Attendees have repeatedly clashed with left-wing groups around Portland, Oregon, where one group supporter was killed this week.The victim, 39-year-old Aaron Danielson, was walking home on Saturday night after a pro-Trump demonstration in the city when he was shot.A Facebook logo is displayed on a smartphone in this illustration taken Jan. 6, 2020.Facebook took down the pages as part of efforts to remove “violent social militias” from its social networks, spokesman Andy Stone said.The company updated its policies last month to ban groups that demonstrate significant risks to public safety.Its dangerous organizations policy now includes groups that celebrate violent acts or suggest they will use weapons, even if they are not directly organizing violence.In a statement posted on Patriot Prayer’s website, Gibson accused Facebook of a double standard.”Antifa groups murdered my friend while he was walking home, and instead of the multibillion dollar company banning Portland Antifa pages they ban Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson and several other grandmas that are admins,” he wrote.Antifa is a largely unstructured, far-left movement whose followers broadly aim to confront those they view as authoritarian or racist.Gibson espouses non-violence but is accused by anti-fascist groups of provoking confrontations.After the shooting of Danielson he cautioned supporters not to seek revenge, but rather “push back politically, spiritually.”As of earlier this week, the Patriot Prayer page had nearly 45,000 followers on Facebook. It was created in 2017.Facebook last week removed content associated with the Kenosha Guard, a group which had posted a “call to arms” in Kenosha, Wisconsin.The company acted the day after two people were shot and killed at protests in the city, which broke out in response to the police shooting of a Black man earlier that week.Users had flagged the material to Facebook 455 times but were told initially it did not violate the company’s policies, BuzzFeed reported.
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Twitter confirmed on Thursday that an account of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal website was hacked with a series of tweets asking its followers to donate to a relief fund through cryptocurrency.
The incident comes after several Twitter accounts of prominent personalities were hacked in July.
Twitter said it was aware of the activity with Modi’s website account and has taken steps to secure it.
“We are actively investigating the situation. At this time, we are not aware of additional accounts being impacted,” a Twitter spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.
Modi’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the tweets posted on the account @narendramodi_in.
The account, with over 2.5 million followers, is the official Twitter handle for Modi’s personal website and the Narendra Modi mobile application.
Modi’s personal Twitter account, which was unaffected by this incident, has over 61 million followers.
The tweets, which have since been taken down, asked the followers to donate to the PM National Relief Fund through cryptocurrency.
Hackers had in July accessed Twitter’s internal systems to hijack some of the platform’s top voices including U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, former U.S. President Barack Obama and billionaire Elon Musk, and used them to solicit digital currency. 
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Facebook Inc said on Thursday it would stop accepting new political ads in the week before the U.S. presidential election in November, bowing to concern that its loose approach to free speech could once again be exploited to interfere with the vote.
 
The world’s biggest social network also said it was creating a label for posts by candidates or campaigns that try to claim victory before the election results are official, and widening the criteria for content to be removed as voter suppression.
 
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post announcing the changes that he was concerned about the unique challenges voters would face due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has prompted a surge in voting by mail.
 
 “I’m also worried that with our nation so divided and election results potentially taking days or even weeks to be finalized, there could be an increased risk of civil unrest across the country,” he said.
 
 Zuckerberg has previously defended his decision to allow for a freewheeling political conversation on Facebook, including through paid ads, which the company exempts from its fact-checking program with external partners, including Reuters.
 
 He said in his post he continued to believe that the “best antidote to bad speech is more speech,” but acknowledged that in the final days of an election, “there may not be enough time to contest new claims.”
 
 Facebook will continue to allow campaigns and others to run political ads that are already in the system, and will permit them to change spending amounts and user targeting, but will block adjustments to the ads’ content or design.
 
 Facebook has been battered by criticism, including from its own employees, since allowing several inflammatory posts by President Donald Trump to remain untouched earlier this summer, including one which contained misleading claims about mail-in ballots.
 
 Disinformation experts have also raised the alarm, echoed in threat assessments by Facebook executives, about false claims and conspiracy theories spreading in the increasingly likely scenario that official results are not immediately available on election night.
 
 Zuckerberg said Facebook was “increasingly seeing attempts to undermine the legitimacy of our elections from within our own borders” in addition to foreign influence campaigns, like the one it and U.S. intelligence agencies determined Russia carried out to meddle in the 2016 vote.
 
 Moscow has denied the allegations.
 
 To address those threats, Facebook will label any posts seeking to delegitimize the outcome of the election, he wrote. The company also will remove posts with misinformation about COVID-19 and voting, which Zuckerberg said could be used to scare people away from exercising their right to vote.
 
 Seeking to boost credible information in addition to tamping down misleading posts, Facebook will partner with Reuters to provide news in the social network’s Voting Information Center about official results.
 
 Zuckerberg said the company would not plan to make any further changes to its election policies beyond those listed in his post before the official declaration of the result.
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Pakistan has blocked access to five dating apps for their delivery of “immoral/indecent content” in the majority-Muslim nation. The state regulator, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, PTA, identified the platforms as Tinder, Grindr, Tagged, Skout and SayHi.”PTA issued notices to the above-mentioned platforms for the purpose of removing dating services and to moderate livestreaming content in accordance with the local laws of Pakistan,” PTA said Tuesday. It did not elaborate on the ban, but the country’s laws prohibit homosexuality and extra-marital relationships. The PTA statement noted that the five companies failed to respond to its directive within the stipulated time, prompting the authority to block their services in Pakistan. The statement did not elaborate on the time frame. Officials at the five companies have not commented on PTA’s action, which has been criticized at home. “PTA, deciding what adults should watch privately or not, is itself “immoral” if “morality” or “moral order” could be understood as a term in Islamic Pakistan! PTA is creating undemocratic trends; courts need to stop PTA!,” tweeted Moeed Pirzada, a prime-time TV news anchor in Pakistan.Tinder is globally popular and owned by Match Group.  FILE – A woman checks the Grindr app on her mobile phone, May 29, 2019.Grindr, which has a large following in the United States, describes itself as a social network “for gay, bi, trans, and queer people.” The PTA directive noted, however, that the authority can unblock the services if the management of their companies “assures adherence to the local laws with respect to moderating the indecent/immoral content through meaningful engagement.”Data from analytics firm Sensor Tower shows Tinder has been downloaded more than 440,000 times in Pakistan within the last 12 months, the Reuters news agency reported. Grindr, Tagged and SayHi have each been downloaded about 300,000 times. Skout has been downloaded 100,000 times during the same period, according to the data.   Last week, PTA formally asked video sharing platforms YouTube and TikTok to immediately block what PTA denounced as “vulgar, indecent, nude and hate speech content for viewing in Pakistan.”   The authorities directed both companies to tighten its content monitoring and moderation mechanism to block access to “the unlawful material” and “objectionable” content. 
 
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Facebook said Tuesday that it removed a small network of accounts and pages linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the “troll factory” that has used social media accounts to sow political discord in the U.S. since the 2016 presidential election.  Twitter also suspended five related accounts. The company said the tweets from these Russia-linked accounts “were low quality and spammy” and that most received few, if any, likes or retweets. The people behind the accounts recruited “unwitting” freelance journalists to post in English and Arabic, mainly targeting left-leaning audiences. Facebook said Tuesday the network’s activity focused on the U.S., U.K., Algeria and Egypt and other English-speaking countries and countries in the Middle East and North Africa.  The company said it started investigating the network based on information from the FBI about its off-Facebook activities. The network was in the early stages of development, Facebook added, and saw “nearly no engagement” on Facebook before it was removed. The network consisted of 13 Facebook accounts and two pages. About 14,000 accounts followed one or more of the pages, though the English-language page had a little over 200 followers, Facebook said.FILE – An man looks at a Facebook app on his smartphone in Amritsar, India, March 22, 2018.Still, its presence points to ongoing Russian efforts to disrupt the U.S. election and sow political discord in an already divided country. To evade detection, the people behind the network recruited Americans to do their bidding, likely unknowingly, both as journalists and as people authorized to purchase political advertisements in the U.S. Facebook said the people behind the network posted about global events ranging from racial justice in the U.S. and the U.K., NATO, the QAnon conspiracy, President Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. The network spent about $480 on advertising on Facebook, primarily in U.S. dollars. However, Facebook said less than $2 worth of those ads targeted the U.S. The network’s posts directed people to a website called PeaceData, which claims to be a global news organization that, according to a  report by research firm Graphika, “took a left-wing stance, opposing what it portrayed as Western imperialism and the excesses of capitalism.” The FBI said in a statement Tuesday that it provided information to the platforms “to better protect against threats to the nation’s security and our democratic processes.” “While technology companies independently make decisions regarding the content of their platforms and the safety of their members, the FBI is actively engaged with our federal partners, election officials, and the private sector to mitigate foreign threats to our nation’s security and our elections,” the statement said.  Separately, Twitter said Tuesday it will start adding context to its trending section, which shows some of the most popular topics on the service at any given moment. Experts and even Twitter’s own employees have expressed concerns that the trending section can be gamed to spread misinformation and abuse. Twitter uses algorithms and human employees to determine what topics are trending — it is not simply the most popular topics, but topics that are newly popular at any given time. But it’s not difficult to artificially elevate trends.  In the coming weeks, Twitter said, users in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, India and several other countries will see brief descriptions added to some trends to add context. “To be clear, we know there is more work to do to improve trends and the context updates we’re announcing today are just a small step in the right direction,” said Liz Lee, a product trust partner and Frank Oppong, a product manager, in a blog post. “We need to make trends better and we will.” 
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Getting an Amazon package delivered from the sky is closer to becoming a reality.The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday it had granted Amazon approval to deliver packages by drones.Amazon said that the approval is an “important step,” but added that it is still testing and flying the drones. It did not say when it expected drones to make deliveries to shoppers.The online shopping giant has been working on drone delivery for years, but it has been slowed by regulatory hurdles. Back in December 2013, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said in a TV interview that drones would be flying to customer’s homes within five years.Last year, Amazon unveiled self-piloting drones that are fully electric, can carry 5 pounds of goods and are designed to deliver items in 30 minutes by dropping them in a backyard. At the time, an Amazon executive said deliveries to shoppers would be happening “within months,” but more than 14 months have passed since then.Seattle-based Amazon is the third drone delivery service to win flight approval, the FAA said. Delivery company UPS and a company owned by search giant Google won approval last year.
 
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