News Round-Up: Airlines Push Back against EU Net Zero Plans, French Parliament Does Not Back New Surveillance Law, and Former Executive on FB’s Collaboration with CCP
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
Facebook tried to build a censorship tool with China’s communist regime – former executive says.
Airlines push back against EU Net Zero plans.
French Parliament rejects a proposal to create a backdoor for messaging apps.
Oxford plans to make 800-year-old Latin ceremony “non-binary”.
UK court sides with a paedophile of foreign origin on his deportation case.
Facebook tried to build a censorship tool with China’s communist regime
According to Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former top Facebook executive, the social media giant collaborated with the Chinese government to find ways to allow Beijing to censor and control content in China, the BBC writes. Wynn-Williams also claims that the social media platform had algorithms that would tell advertisers when it was the 'right' time to send an ad to a psychologically vulnerable teenager.
China has the world's largest social media market, but access to Facebook is still blocked there, as is the case with X and YouTube. Now, however, Wynn-Williams, the former director of global public policy at Facebook, has come out with statements and a book claiming that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had talked to the Chinese communist regime in view of hiding posts until the Chinese authorities had verified them. Facebook could have thus gained access to millions of Chinese users.
Former New Zealand diplomat Sarah Wynn-Williams joined Facebook in 2011. She has written about her experiences of working with Facebook's top team in her new book, Careless People. The purpose of publishing the book is, in the author's words, to show the moral compromises in decision-making that she says went on when she was working at the company.
One of the key allegations in her book is that Facebook cooperated closely with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to build a censorship tool.
When other governments asked for clarification on how the software worked, she says, the answer was always that it was proprietary information. But when it came to China, "the curtain was pulled back" and Facebook made every effort to ensure that Chinese officials were sufficiently qualified and upskilled to test the censorship version of Facebook.
As another important allegation, Wynn-Williams describes Facebook's experiments with algorithms that could tell at what point its teenager users feel psychologically vulnerable. For example, if a teenage girl had deleted a selfie or used the word “worthless” or “unhappy” on Meta owned Facebook or Instagram, the platforms could have alerted a beauty salon, for example, that it was a good time to send her an ad. In fact, company documents on the existence of such algorithms were leaked to the public in 2017.
Meta has refuted Wynn-Williams' claims and says her employment was terminated in 2017 "for poor performance". As well as poor performance, Meta says the 45-year-old was also fired for "toxic behaviour" after she had made "misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment". Wynn-Williams told the BBC she was let go after she complained about inappropriate comments by one of her bosses, Joel Kaplan, who is now Meta's chief global affairs officer.
The company has started legal proceedings against Wynn-Williams' book to prevent the author from promoting it or talking about it.
Airlines push back to EU Net Zero plans
The head of global airlines body International Air Transport Association (IATA) has welcomed a call by Europe's top carriers for a delay of the 2030 target of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) use in Europe, saying Brussels policymakers need to face reality, Reuters reports. "We can't just stand back and pretend that these targets are meaningful and can be achieved. They were never going to be capable of being achieved,” Willie Walsh, director general of the IATA, said.
Under European Union rules, suppliers must ensure that 2% of fuel available at EU airports by 2025 is SAF, rising to 6% in 2030 and gradually to 70% in 2050.
Airlines say SAF is barely available and that they are being blamed for shortfalls in its availability from the energy industry while insisting they remain committed to a broader industry goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
European airline leaders earlier issued their bluntest warning yet that the near-term EU fuel mandates, which IATA has opposed, were beyond reach and urged the new European Commission to focus on the sector's competitiveness.
French Parliament rejects a proposal to create a backdoor for messaging apps
The French parliament's lower house, the National Assembly, rejected a law that would have allowed security services to access messages on Signal, WhatsApp or other messaging apps that use encryption. According to the interior minister Bruno Retailleau, the main aim of the measure was to catch drug traffickers, but opponents of the bill claimed all users of the apps would suffer from future surveillance, writes Le Monde.
The French upper house of the parliament, the Senate, had previously adopted the same bill, but minister Retailleau failed to convince the members of the National Assembly of the need for this proposed plan. MPs saw the measure as a step towards blanket surveillance, and considered it an expression of the desire to restrict people's privacy, freedom of opinion, expression, and movement.
The proposed backdoor law on encrypted messages was disguised as a law to combat drug crime, but critics said it was one of the most repressive and dangerous texts produced in recent years, a pipe dream of surveillance. Under the draft, law enforcement could have tacitly joined encrypted conversations, including private ones. According to cybersecurity experts, such a backdoor would have created a significant level of vulnerability that would have compromised the conversations of all users, undermining trust in secure communication platforms, and creating tools for abuse.
Oxford plans to make 800-year-old Latin ceremony “non-binary”
Oxford University intends to make an 800-year-old Latin ceremony gender-neutral for the sake of “non-binary” students, The Telegraph reports. The changes would eliminate all gendered language from Latin texts used in graduation ceremonies. Terms such as magistri (masters) and doctores (doctors), grammatically masculine, are to be replaced with cumbersome alternatives like vos, simply meaning “you” – even though the masculine plural has always been used for mixed groups of men and women. Even the Latin word for “who” is to be rewritten to avoid any suggestion of grammatical gender. The changes will likely be implemented in all ceremonies from October onwards. They will also affect other formal occasions, such as the admission of a new Vice-Chancellor, where references in English to “his” or “her” tenure will be replaced with “their”.
Oxford insists the overhaul is “necessary so that the Latin used can refer to those who identify as non-binary as well as those who identify as male and female.” It also claims it is merely aligning itself with UK legal requirements for higher education.
UK court sides with a paedophile on his deportation case
A paedophile who attacked a teen girl was allowed to stay in the UK because he is an alcoholic, The Sun reports. The man, granted anonymity for his protection, argued he could not seek help for his alcoholism in his native Pakistan. The man was in court because he had targeted a child after he had been released from prison for other sex crimes.
The Home Office issued him with a deportation order, but — while jailed for a year for assaulting the teenager — he appealed it using the European Convention of Human Rights.
He won the right to stay after a judge ruled he would face “inhuman or degrading treatment” in his home country due to his “uncontrollable” boozing. Drinking alcohol as a Muslim is illegal in his native Pakistan. He claimed jail conditions in the country would be so gruesome that his deportation would mount to a violation of his right to avoid inhumane treatment.
He also argued he should be able to stay because he had a “genuine relationship” with his child in the UK, even though they had not spoken since 2020. That was rejected as the judge found there was “lack of evidence” about his family life.
The Home Office last week won an appeal and the case will be heard again later this year.
Re the French news - BTW excellent outcome - the answer to the creepy politicians using this false argument of combating drug crime as a pretext to get into everyone's phones should be: "just use classic law enforcement techniques more widely, such as undercover cops infiltrating these networks, placing sensors on their locations, bribing gang members to grass on the others and any methods that require actual guts".