The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is the chief competition regulator of the Government of Australia, located within the Department of the Treasury. It was established in 1995 with the amalgamation of the Australian Trade Practices Commission and the Prices Surveillance Authority to administer the Trade Practices Act 1974, which was renamed the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 on 1 January 2011. The ACCC's mandate is to protect consumer rights and business rights and obligations, to perform industry regulation and price monitoring, and to prevent illegal anti-competitive behaviour.
Mass media in Australia spans traditional and digital formats, and caters mostly to its predominantly English-speaking population. It is delivered in a variety of formats including radio, television, paper, internet and IPTV. Varieties include local, regional, state, federal and international sources of media, reporting on Australian news, opinion, policy, issues and culture.
The National Do Not Call List (DNCL) is a list administered by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that enables residents of Canada to decide whether or not to receive telemarketing calls. It was first announced by the Government of Canada on 13 December 2004.
Michael Allen Geist is a Canadian academic, and the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He is the editor of four books on copyright law and privacy law, and he edits two newsletters on Canadian information technology and privacy law.
In Canada, appeals by the judiciary to community standards and the public interest are the ultimate determinants of which forms of expression may legally be published, broadcast, or otherwise publicly disseminated. Other public organisations with the authority to censor include some tribunals and courts under provincial human rights laws, and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, along with self-policing associations of private corporations such as the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.
The Broadcasting Act, given royal assent on 1 February 1991, is an act of the Parliament of Canada regarding broadcasting of telecommunications in the country.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) is a British non-profit organisation with offices in London and Washington, D.C. that works to stop the spread of online hate speech and disinformation. It campaigns to deplatform people that it believes promote hate or misinformation, and campaigns to restrict media organisations such as The Daily Wire from advertising. CCDH is a member of the Stop Hate For Profit coalition.
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities. Since 2006, Facebook allows everyone to register from 13 years old, except in the case of a handful of nations, where the age limit is 14 years. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed 3 billion monthly active users. As of October 2023, Facebook ranked as the 3rd most visited website in the world with 22.56% of its traffic coming from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.
Canada ranks as the 21st in the world for Internet usage with 31.77 million users as of July 2016 (est), making up 89.8% of the population. According to Harvard researchers, Canada has some of the lowest internet standards among OECD countries, as a result of high costs and slow internet speeds.
Facebook has been the subject of criticism and legal action since it was founded in 2004. Criticisms include the outsize influence Facebook has on the lives and health of its users and employees, as well as Facebook's influence on the way media, specifically news, is reported and distributed. Notable issues include Internet privacy, such as use of a widespread "like" button on third-party websites tracking users, possible indefinite records of user information, automatic facial recognition software, and its role in the workplace, including employer-employee account disclosure. The use of Facebook can have negative psychological and physiological effects that include feelings of sexual jealousy, stress, lack of attention, and social media addiction that in some cases is comparable to drug addiction.
The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, abbreviated as Roskomnadzor (RKN), is the Russian federal executive agency responsible for monitoring, controlling and censoring Russian mass media. Its areas of responsibility include electronic media, mass communications, information technology and telecommunications, supervising compliance with the law, protecting the confidentiality of personal data being processed, and organizing the work of the radio-frequency service.
Net neutrality in Canada is a debated issue, but not to the degree of partisanship in other nations, such as the United States, in part because of its federal regulatory structure and pre-existing supportive laws that were enacted decades before the debate arose. In Canada, Internet service providers (ISPs) generally provide Internet service in a neutral manner. Some notable incidents otherwise have included Bell Canada's throttling of certain protocols and Telus's censorship of a specific website critical of the company.
Instagram is an photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social media platform, it is available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web. Users can take photos and edit them using built-in filters and other tools, then share them on other social media platforms like Facebook. It supports 32 languages including English, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese.
Facebook has been involved in multiple controversies involving censorship of content, removing or omitting information from its services in order to comply with company policies, legal demands, and government censorship laws.
Big Tech, also known as the Tech Giants, are the largest information technology companies. The term most often refers to the Big Five tech companies in the United States: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. In China, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi (BATX) are the equivalent of the Big Five. Big Tech can also include smaller tech companies with high valuations, such as Netflix and Nvidia, or non-tech companies with high-tech practices, such as the automaker Tesla.
Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta, and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services. Meta ranks among the largest American information technology companies, alongside other Big Five corporations Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. The company was ranked #31 on the Forbes Global 2000 ranking in 2023.
Facebook, Inc., has been involved in many lawsuits since its founding in 2004.
The Digital Services Act is a regulation in EU law to update the Electronic Commerce Directive 2000 regarding illegal content, transparent advertising, and disinformation. It was submitted along with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) by the European Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on 15 December 2020. The DSA was prepared by the Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age Margrethe Vestager and by the European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton, as members of the Von der Leyen Commission.
The News Media Bargaining Code is a law designed to have large technology platforms that operate in Australia pay local news publishers for the news content made available or linked on their platforms. The law's definition of news is broad, including "content that reports, investigates or explains ... current issues or events of public significance for Australians at a local, regional or national level." Originating in April 2020, when the Australian Government asked the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) to begin drafting it, it achieved broad support in the Australian Parliament but staunch opposition from Facebook and Google. In response, on 18 February 2021, Facebook blocked Australian users from sharing or viewing news content on its platform. The Australian government strongly criticised the move, saying it demonstrated the "immense market power of these digital social giants". A few days later, Australia and Facebook came to an agreement on restoring news pages.
The Online Streaming Act, commonly known as Bill C-11, is a bill introduced in the 44th Canadian Parliament. It was first introduced on November 3, 2020, by Minister of Canadian Heritage Steven Guilbeault during the second session of the 43rd Canadian Parliament. Commonly known as Bill C-10, the bill was passed in the House of Commons on June 22, 2021, but failed to pass the Senate before Parliament was dissolved for a federal election. It was reintroduced with amendments as the Online Streaming Act during the first session of the 44th Canadian Parliament in February 2022, passed in the House of Commons on June 21, 2022, and passed in the Senate on February 2, 2023. It received royal assent on April 27, 2023, after the consideration of amendments by the House.
