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Britain tries to work out what a journalist is
- nanis 5y agoNasty. > In the draft legislation, the U.K. government said the most popular platforms — "category one" companies like Facebook and Twitter — will be required to safeguard all journalistic material shared on their platform. > Posts will be deemed “journalistic content” if “the content is generated for the purposes of journalism” and “the content is U.K.-linked,” according to the draft law. Either everyone has freedom of speech or no one does.
- dane-pgp 5y agoIndeed. The requirement that the content be "U.K.-linked" is particularly worrying, because a regulator may decide that images of British-made bombs being used in foreign war crimes is not a sufficient link, or similarly images of protesters being crushed in a country that Britain wants to do a trade deal with. Even if the politically-appointed regulator never explicitly states what bias these platforms should have, there's the danger that the platforms might pre-emptively adopt a bias as a plausibly deniable quid pro quo to avoid anti-trust investigations or a strict application of a digital services tax.
- dane-pgp 5y ago> "I can easily see a situation arising where, for example, a young woman walking to a shop films a police officer holding his knee on a man’s neck, and a regulator, under government pressure, orders that video to be pulled off social media sites on the grounds that the young woman was not an accredited journalist, and that the violent video constitutes subjectively harmful content." My worry is not that the government is unaware of this potential consequence of its regulations, but that it is fully aware and has designed the regulations to make these outcomes more likely.