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Denis OBrien. Photograph; Dara Mac Dnaill

The Department of Communications will mark Halloween by taking charge of the new dual-notification system for media mergers, as government responsibility for the area transfers from the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation to its domain.

Minister for Communications Alex White will make the call on whether or not a media merger is in the public interest, while the new Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) will determine if a deal can go ahead on competition grounds.

The legislation governing media ownership and control was updated earlier this year in Part 4 of the Competition and Consumer Protection Act, 2014, which commences tomorrow.

Whites department is still working on the guidelines that will underpin how the media mergers process will work in practice. These guidelines are expected to address the levels of media ownership that would be regarded as contrary to the public interest.

They may also detail the indicators that will be used to assess diversity - both of content and ownership - in the media sector and determine whether a merger should go ahead.

The guidelines will be published in draft form in early November, the Department says.

They are unlikely to prove too spooky for Independent News & Medias biggest shareholder, Denis OBrien, who also owns the Communicorp radio group. OBrien is officially deemed by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland not to control INM.

But there are some who find OBriens growing media influence a concern. Communicorp station Newstalk is now the largest supplier of radio news in Ireland after last week signing a contract to provide news to six UTV radio stations. The agreement prompted Samus Dooley, Irish secretary of the National Union of Journalists, to call on White to cry halt to what he described as this latest threat to media diversity.

In Dublin alone stations either owned by Communicorp or already supplied news by Newstalks syndicated service have a combined market share of 39.1 per cent, while UTVs music stations FM104 and Q102 have a combined 18.5 per cent share of listeners.

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Media mergers regime change tomorrow

In a new study, researchers have discovered that posts on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter could help control the spread of HIV.

Although public health researchers have focused early applications of social media on reliably monitoring the spread of diseases such as the flu, Sean Young of the Center for Digital Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that we were still in the early stages of testing how powerful these technologies would be.

He added that with the right tools in place, social media could offer a rich source of psychological and health-related data generated in an environment in which people are often willing to share freely.

His recent work on Behavioral Insights on Big Data (BIBD) for HIV offers the tantalizing possibility that insights gleaned from social media could be used to help governments, public health departments, hospitals, and caretakers monitor people's health behaviors "to know where, when, and how we might be able to prevent HIV transmission."

Young details a social-media-based intervention in which African American and Latino men who have sex with men shared a tremendous amount of personal information through social media, including when or whether they had "come out," as well as experiences of homelessness and stigmatization. What's more, they found that people who discussed HIV prevention topics on social media were more than twice as likely to later request an HIV test.

In the context of HIV prevention, tweets have also been shown to identify people who are currently or were soon to engage in sexual- or drug-related risk behaviors. Those tweets could be mapped to particular locations and related to actual HIV trends.

Young said there was a need for updated infrastructure and sophisticated toolkits to handle all of those data, noting that there are about 500 million communications sent every day on Twitter alone.

Although privacy concerns about such uses of social media shouldn't be ignored, Young said there was evidence that people had already begun to accept such uses of social media, even by corporations looking to boost profits.

The study is published in the journal Cell Press.

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Facebook, Twitter may help restrain spread of HIV, says study

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