30 Sep 2019 How the 5G wireless dividend can help connect those left behind
Private, public, and civil society actors should work together to encourage more sustainable financing of universal access efforts...
23 Sep 2019 Political accountability in the age of Twitter
Photo: London UK. 24th July 2019. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, delivers a speech outside 10 Downing Street. Credit: Michael Tubi/Shutterstock On 19 September, Veteran BBC journalist John Humphreys hosted his last “Today” radio programme after 32 years. Known for his aggressive interviewing on a morning...
16 Sep 2019 When fact-checking isn’t about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’
The rise of “fake news” charges and deliberate disinformation have led to an important counter effort: fact-checking. News agencies, civil society organisations, and concerned individuals have taken on the fight for “truth” – assessing political claims and struggling to prevent misinformation guiding our decisions and...
09 Sep 2019 Children’s communication rights need better protection
Google should have known better! An Associated Press piece in The Guardian newspaper (“YouTube fined $170m for collecting children’s personal data”, 4 September 2019) notes a serious violation of children’s right to privacy: “Google’s video site YouTube has been fined $170m to settle allegations it collected children’s personal data...
02 Sep 2019 Climate change literacy and community media
Not everyone is familiar with climate change. A new survey released by Afrobarometer paints a bleak picture of how agriculture conditions are worsening due to higher temperatures, delayed rainfall, and crop failure. Crucially, among some people, it also identifies little or no knowledge about climate change itself.
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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