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Facebook's oversight board last week overturned Meta's decision to leave up a video in which Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen threatened his political opponents with violence. The independent board said that "given the severity of the violation", and Hun Sen's record of rights abuses and use of social media to amplify threats, his Facebook and Instagram pages must be suspended for six months.

Meta agreed to take down the video, and said it would respond to the recommendation to suspend Hun Sen's accounts after a review.

Ahead of the board's decision, Hun Sen said he had stopped using Facebook, and would instead use TikTok and messaging app Telegram to communicate with the public.

The board's decision comes just weeks before a general election in Cambodia that human rights groups and opposition parties have called a sham.

Rights groups have said that Hun Sen, who has led Cambodia for nearly four decades, has long used Facebook to intimidate political opponents and critics, charges that his administration denies.

Now, the president has been finally called out "for using social media to incite violence against his opponents," said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

"This kind of face-off between Big Tech and a dictator over human rights issues is long overdue," Robertson said in a statement. "The stakes are high because plenty of real world harm is caused when an authoritarian uses social media to incite violence - as we have already seen far too many times in Cambodia."

Rest of the world: what’s new?

United States

Avi Asher-Schapiro, U.S. tech correspondent

Tech publication Gizmodo noticed a tweak in Google's privacy policy over the weekend in which the tech giant explicitly reserves the right to harness user-generated content to train its AI system.

Previous versions of the policy had stated that Google used the data to help perfect its translation services, but the new policy explicitly name-checks Google's new AI-powered chatbot Bard as well as its Cloud AI product.

"There's a good chance that Bard and ChatGPT ingested your long forgotten blog posts or 15-year-old restaurant reviews," Gizmodo noted.

Africa

Kim Harrisberg, South Africa correspondent

Kenya has launched one of Africa's few digital sex offender registries and opened it up to the public and legal officers, Tech Cabal reported.

The country is attempting to balance the right to privacy with public safety by opening it up to judicial officers and ordinary citizens who request access by completing a digital form.

"We have taken this step in response to ... the lack of reliable and accessible data on the prevalence, patterns and trends of these crimes and those who commit them," said the country's chief justice Martha Koome.

Europe

Adam Smith, UK tech correspondent

Russia's demand for surveillance tools during its war in Ukraine has sparked a cottage industry of tracking tech, according to a New York Times report.

Location monitoring, social media logs, and hacking have all been weapons of a little-known coterie of Russian technology firms.

While citizens have turned to encrypted messaging platforms, which the Russian state cannot break, they can still track users through metadata and telecom providers.

Latin America

Diana Baptista, Mexico correspondent

The Mexican Senate has launched a series of public forums to discuss the regulation of social media platforms in the country, based on a decalogue written by academics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The decalogue proposes that digital platforms should be considered intermediaries and could be liable for not erasing harmful content published by their users. It recommends they develop mechanisms to curb online disinformation, such as identifying bots and orchestrated spread of fake news.

Digital rights groups like Access Now, R3D, and Social TIC have warned that the decalogue could represent a "serious risk to the right of freedom of expression", as it allows the government to decide which content complies with the requisite of "veracity."