26 Aug 2019 Privacy on the frontier of lawlessness
Privacy was something that used to be taken for granted. Ordinarily, the private life of an individual was not open to scrutiny, while public life was the concern of law and order and decency. In communication terms, privacy meant that only the addressee could open letters...
19 Aug 2019 Ban books, ban people
“For the past twenty years, the main issue restricting ublic debate in terms of Turkish laws has been the prosecution and imprisonment of journalists, writers and intellectuals on the grounds that they contribute to violence and terrorism.” This quote comes from a report by English PEN,...
12 Aug 2019 From manufacturing consent to manufacturing consensus
An influential book on communications in the 1980s was Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Communication, by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. It proposed a “propaganda model” as a way of understanding how the mass media system intersected with the U.S. economy, political system, and...
06 Aug 2019 It’s vital to be able to “read” social media
In an era when misinformation and “fake news” abound on social media, it is important to understand where people get their news.
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29 Jul 2019 Big data’s big brother: Real-time data processing
Walk around any city and your face will be caught on camera and might even be added to a facial-recognition database. That data can now be processed in real-time. Regulations about how it can be used are minimal and generally weak.
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22 Jul 2019 “Democracy, as we know it, is about to die…”
There was a mantra among communities and businesses when foreign goods and huge chain stores started crowding out small, local operations. “Buy local” was the cry.
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15 Jul 2019 Civil rights and the climate crisis
Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, writes that the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of...
08 Jul 2019 Short-sighted policies for short-term gain
Accessibility and affordability are watchwords of the communication rights movement. Yet when it comes to digital access, governments have still not got their act together.
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01 Jul 2019 A voluntary way of holding social media to account
Article 19 – the international freedom of expression organization – has proposed creating Social Media Councils (SMCs) as a way of moderating content on social media based on a “multi-stakeholder accountability mechanism”.