This week on CrowdJustice, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain raise funds for a landmark case on the rights for outsourced workers, local residents fight against the use of London parks for private events, a local councillor brings a challenge which impacts how fracking can be addressed at a local level and families of murder victims raise funds for the inquests.
Free speech, hate speech
A neo-Nazi deleted two posts on Gab, a social media company popular with the alt-right and white supremacists, after Microsoft's cloud computing service threatened to block the platform, reports The Hill. The article cites several platforms that are cracking down on far-right sites like right-wing conspiracy site Infowars, in what appears to be part of a larger effort to curb harmful speech online.
The New York Times writes that Facebook, which has also recently banned Infowars, took the decision at such a high level that Mark Zuckerberg got involved. Although Infowars’ founder is using the ban to claim “free speech martyrdom”, the Times opines that “slippery-slope fears about mass censorship by social media platforms are probably overblown”; and that “taking action against Infowars could allow social media giants to avoid future conflicts over extreme content by setting a new, hard-to-beat standard for unacceptable toxicity.”
Death and social media
The German Federal Court has ruled that a person’s Facebook account can pass to his or her heirs after death, according to LexisNexis Family Law blog. The German ruling appears to create a default opt-in that would ensure social media accounts pass to heirs after death unless a user explicitly asks that it does not. Facebook had argued that an account was personal to a user, and could not be inherited, but the court disagreed.
Fall-out from Cambridge Analytica
Wired reports that ITN solicitors have filed a 27-page letter before action against Facebook, on behalf of a group of UK residents whose Facebook data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica. The letter accuses Facebook of breaching user privacy, and provides a list of questions to be answered within 14 days. Nearly 1.1 million British citizens could be eligible to join the suit if it goes forward.