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...
26 August, 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...
19 August, 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...
12 August, 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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06 August, 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...
29 July, 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”...
22 July, 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...
15 July, 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...
08 July, 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...
01 July, 2019
Unfriendly-fire: Media freedom under threat
“Elected leaders in many democracies, who should be press freedom’s staunchest defenders, have made explicit attempts to silence critical media voices and strengthen...
24 June, 2019
Internet governance should work towards mechanisms to reinvigorate independent journalism
A free and independent media sector is one of the cornerstones of what it means for a country to be a liberal democracy....
17 June, 2019
True public service media to the rescue
Every ten years or so the BBC comes in for criticism for being too partial or too impartial.
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10 June, 2019