Mediaboss Marketing

OpinionCommentDowning Street has been accused of acting like Donald Trump

Tuesday, 4th February 2020, 8:21 am

Up until the general election, Dominic Cummings, the Prime Ministers de facto chief of staff, and his director of communications Lee Cain were too distracted to do much about it.

But having secured an 80-seat majority, the pair have all but declared war on the parliamentary lobby journalists in a bid to exercise their new-found strength.

i's opinion newsletter: talking points from today

Out of favour

First was a change to the lobby briefing system - the twice daily meetings where journalists can fire questions at the Prime Minister's official spokesman.

Cain insisted that all meetings would be held in Downing Street rather than the Commons. This raised concerns that it would give No 10 the power to refuse entry for any journalists who had fallen out of favour.

No 10 has repeated the move, attempting to freeze out several journalists from a Downing Street briefing with the Governments lead Brexit negotiator David Frost, only this time it prompted a walkout.

Rather than subject himself to regular interviews with political correspondents, Mr Johnson has preferred the tightly managed Peoples PMQs held on Facebook.

'Trumpian'

It is a power play by Cummings and Cain who prioritise message discipline above all else and who view the favoured outlets as being essential to getting their message out. The move has been described as Trumpian by opposition MPs, due to its similarity to how the US President excludes certain reporters he does not like.

It would be easy to dismiss this as sour grapes at not being one of the chosen few titles, but it is a worrying sign of things to come.

Shutting out certain publications damages the bedrock of a free media which exists to help hold the Government to account.

View original post here:
Boris Johnsons advisers want to exert more control over the media message - inews

A new study on three major social networks in China finds that tolerating small, relatively free platforms helps the Chinese government maintain sufficiently high market-level censorship in an overall low-pressure environment. However, larger platforms censor more content than small competitors.

As apolitical crisis has gripped Hong Kong in the last seven months, videos of hundreds of thousands of marchers poured over Twitter overnight and quickly turned into sympathetic memes. But a search for Hong Kong on TikTok reveals barely a hint of unrest in sight, despite the fact that the Chinese-owned app has over 500 million active users worldwide and is ranked 9th in terms of social media sites ahead of LinkedIn and Twitter.

Shortly after the initial demonstrations back in June, the Chinese government distributed vague guidelines to digital platforms about what they should censor. Platform owners are now responsible for obeying and blacklisting any offending content generated by their users. For example, if a platform chooses to blacklist Hong Kong protest, none of its users will be able to deliver any messages containing these keywords, sometimes accompanied by a warning sign saying that Your message contains sensitive keywords, please try again.

On the one hand, Chinese platforms are under some political pressure to promptly remove certain user-generated content. If they fail to do so, platforms are subject to a fine and risk being temporarily shut down by the government, a cost that is often tied to platforms size. On the other hand, by strategically delaying censorship, a Chinese platform may attract users who try to evade censorship by switching between platforms. This opportunity of user-switching incentivizes each platform to differentiate its timing of censorshipeven more so when its competitors are big and committed to censoring early.

My research examines the relationship between online platforms size, political pressure, and their compliance with censorship regulations. I find that while large platforms censor more aggressively on average than their small competitors, decentralizing onlinemarket power could help authoritarian regimes maintain information control with minimal enforcement.

Using a novel dataset (provided by the Citizen Lab) on platforms in China with a combined market share of over 60 percent in 2015YY Live, 9158, and Sina ShowI measured each platforms compliance behavior by examining when and how many keywords the platform has added to its own blacklist following a sequence of salient events. The dataset contains the complete history of blacklisted keywords adopted by each of the three platforms over two years (from May 2015 to September 2017).

I exploited the unexpected occurrence of 30 political and social events during the data collection period, such as the 2015 Tianjin Explosion that killed nearly 200 people and fueled fears of toxic air and distrust of government, or the 2016 international tribunal that ruled against Chinas claim to the historic rights of the South China Sea area. Those salient events triggered the governments censorship request and surveillance, as well as the need for platforms to comply.

I extracted the specific event dates from multiple news sources and cross-checked them with their Wikipedia entries, if available. By comparing the timing and frequency of platforms blacklists update over a 2-month event window, I find that platforms of different sizes exhibit different compliance behavior: the largest platform not only censored a higher number of keywords on average, it also complied faster than the smaller platforms.

Motivated by the event-study results, I further developed a structural model where a platforms profit depends on its own censorship decision as well as that of its competitors, induced by the switching behavior of users with a diverse taste for censorship. Relative to their small competitors, a large platform is often under higher political pressure and thus more responsive to the governments censorship requests. However, centralizing market power via merging or shutting down small platforms doesnt necessarily create more disruption in users content creation.

If a market hosts fewer platforms, two factors are at play: first, each platform captures a larger market share and bears higher political costs of non-compliance; second, platforms have more strategic incentives to differentiate from other obedient competitors with non-compliance, now that users have fewer options to switch to.

Following this change in the market structure, whether a platform is more or less likely to censor during the next salient event depends on which of the two forces dominates. If even a slight increase in a platforms size alarms the government and significantly raises its risk of non-compliance, the former political pressure would dominate and generate more censorship in the marketplace. If, on the other hand, limiting the number of alternatives encourages more users to switch between platforms due to sufficiently lower switching or search cost, then the latter strategic incentive would dominate and cause platforms to censor less often in equilibrium.

To quantify the relative magnitude of these two forces and derive meaningful counterfactual predictions, I estimated the model by exploiting variations in platforms market share across different events in my dataset.

My counterfactual analysis shows that permanently shutting down a small platform could backfire and lead to an unintended consequence where the overall censorship is lower in the marketplace.This is because if the non-compliant platform is no longer present, the remaining two platforms will share the whole market. They will both obtain stronger strategic incentives to differentiate by not censoring, as they expect to attract more switching users from its now only competitor. When the absence of a non-compliant platform encourages the remaining platforms to comply significantly less often, market concentration is pushing down the overall censorship in the marketplace.

Past research suggested that an authoritarian regimes chances of survival decline with the number of information sources, unless there are strong economies of scale in information control. To preserve political stability, authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia have always been heavy-handed in regulating private media outlets. With nearly half of the total world population owning a social media account, however, blindly penalizing emerging platforms for non-compliance no longer comes with a negligible cost in this digital age.

My findings indicate that decentralizing online market power may help an authoritarian government maintain sufficiently high market-level censorship in an overall low-pressure environment: tolerating (or even encouraging) a bit of dissent on small platforms allows big platforms to censor more effectively as it mitigates their strategic incentives. This might be one of the reasons why, unlike in the United States, where the market is dominated by a handful of mainstream social media platforms, Chinese social media is still very fragmented and localized.

Beyond China, my findings also offer some useful insights on how to regulate digital platforms in Western democracies. In 2017, Germanys parliament passed a law requesting social networks to delete hate-speech postings and misinformation within 24 hours, or they would face fines of up to 50 million. The German Ministry of Justice criticized Facebook for not handling user complaints quickly, saying that the company deleted only 39 percent of the criminal content reported by users. Twitters compliance was not found satisfactory either: a German government-funded survey claimed that none of Twitters deletions took place within 24 hours.

Although most people dislike misinformation and wish to have it removed, a piece of fake news takes time to verify and it sometimes becomes the alternative truth among many before it is proven deceptive. In fact, creating borderline content has become one of the few proven recipes for success, as it brings more engagement the closer a piece of content comes to violating a platforms rules. To counter misinformation, policymakers should pay extra attention to small platforms especially when large platforms are pressured to purge borderline contents quickly.

When two segments of users co-existone is quick to identify misinformation and the other takes it as the alternative truthremoving the same piece of content pleases the former at the expense of upsetting the latter. If large platforms are expected to be more responsible for removing misinformation or to take actions faster, the latter group may disproportionally switch to small platforms that receive less legal attention every time a piece of misinformation turns viral. Subsequently, social media mergers and acquisitions not only affect the parties involved but could also significantly distort other small incumbents incentives to comply with the regulationa distortion that may exacerbate the spread of misinformation and create more echo chambers in the long run.

The ProMarket blog is dedicated to discussing how competition tends to be subverted by special interests. The posts represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty. For more information, please visitProMarket Blog Policy.

See more here:
How Allowing a Little Bit of Dissent Helps the Chinese Government Control Social Media - - ProMarket

The future landscape of the automotive industry looks very different from its past and with autonomous vehicles moving from a design blueprint to reality on our roads it means that traffic laws will have to adapt to these changing circumstances.

With driverless trucks taking to the highways to deliver goods across the country it is highly relevant to look at the implications of a potential accident or violation when a human driver is not in control of that vehicle.

Here is an overview of how the introduction of autonomous delivery and cargo trucks will impact the current driving laws.

A fundamental point to remember is that we are still a long way off a scenario where trucks are hauling cargo around the country with no human operator anywhere to be seen.

Also, the human touch will always be required in certain circumstances and if you are involved in a collision you will want to appoint semi truck accident lawyers who are tough, but compassionate too, who will look after your interests and understand the legal implications.

Technology is evolving at a pace and where we are at at the present time is a sort of halfway house in which modern vehicles are making use of available technology such as cameras, sensors, and automatic braking, in order to keep the occupants as safe as possible.

Therefore, it is still very much the case that human drivers are expected to take an active role in the control and navigation of their vehicles.

The current situation is that self-driving trucks are legally regulated at a state level and only about a third of states have actually passed laws that specifically relate to autonomous vehicles.

The federal government appears to be in a state of hesitancy and uncertainty and many of the current official views tend to be more a case of recommendations regarding safety protocols rather than being specific regulations.

The most prominent piece of legislation passed so far with regard to autonomous vehicles is the SELF DRIVE Act, which was unanimously passed in 2017, however, this act excluded self-driving trucks.

The reason for this was primarily due to union concerns who are fearful of a cull of truck drivers once automation takes hold. Regulations are likely to catch up at some point with regard to self-driving trucks but it is a gray area at present.

In light of this situation the burning question is what sort of action can you take and what level of compensation will you be able to claim if you are involved in a collision with a self-driving truck.

When you consider how confused and unsure lawmakers appear to be regarding autonomous vehicles at the moment it highlights how important it could be to get some professional legal guidance if you are unfortunate enough to be involved in a collision with a truck, especially one that is completely self-driven, or somewhere between the two.

Go here to see the original:
What are the legal implications of autonomous delivery and cargo trucks? - AZ Big Media

To the Editor:

Re No Right Way to Mourn, by Sian Beilock, the president of Barnard College (Op-Ed, Feb. 3), about criticism on social media of the different ways that people grieve:

I lost a classmate when Tess Majors, a Barnard freshman, was killed, and a hometown legend when the basketball star Kobe Bryant died.

Im a first-year Barnard student, and Im from Los Angeles; I didnt know how to deal with either loss because of the proximity I felt to them. Ms. Beilocks article, as well as her actions on campus since Tess died, have comforted me as I found myself feeling self-conscious about my public grieving process.

I didnt post about Tess, and I didnt post about Kobe. Was I a bad classmate? A bad Angeleno? No. Ms. Beilocks article helped me acknowledge that there was no way I could have grieved incorrectly.

Any way I grieve and mourn is the right way for me, and anything I do or not do doesnt make me less of a Barnard woman or a Los Angeles resident.

Naomi RubinNew York

To the Editor:

As Sian Beilock points out so eloquently, the downside of social media is possible exposure to vilification by a world of strangers. Everyone just judges you.

When youre grieving, however, youre at your most fragile. Be prepared.

Florence IsaacsNew YorkThe writer is the author of Do I Have to Wear Black to a Funeral? and My Deepest Sympathies.

To the Editor:

Re Court to Decide Whether Employers Must Offer Birth Control (news article, Jan. 18):

When the Supreme Court debates the right of employers to refuse coverage of birth control for their employees, one fact cannot be overlooked: Each form of birth control holds powerful health benefits separate and distinct from preventing pregnancy.

Some are approved for these noncontraceptive indications by the Food and Drug Administration: The hormonal intrauterine device is first-line therapy for heavy menstrual bleeding, and many brands of birth control pills are approved for the treatment of acne and/or premenstrual mood disorders.

The three most common contraception methods (the pill, the hormonal IUD and the copper IUD) have powerful protective effects against uterine cancer, the most common gynecologic cancer. Long-term use of the pill halves the lifetime risk of ovarian cancer, the most lethal of gynecologic cancers.

I often start young women on the pill or a hormonal IUD to improve heavy, painful or irregular periods that otherwise would keep them home from school or work.

The health and financial burdens to women and society of unplanned pregnancy are one reason to ensure access to birth control. The health benefits that birth control provides independent from contraception are a critical second.

Laura MacIsaacNew YorkThe writer, an obstetrician-gynecologist, is associate director of the Fellowship in Complex Family Planning at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai Health System.

To the Editor:

Re Why Politicians Get a License to Lie, by Charlie Warzel (Opinion, Jan. 8):

There is only one fundamental license to lie: when theres a credulous public. You cannot be insulted (lied to) without your permission. We have glommed super-high-tech glitz and slickness onto a 24/7 media blitz of entertainment and salesmanship that relies almost exclusively on the mass of its readers suspending disbelief. This is the essence of 21st-century culture and thus of its politics.

I have never seen one thing on Facebook. I have never seen Twitter or any social media vehicle other than texting. The majority of all those who have ever lived have never done so.

I read The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The Economist, among other traditional print news organizations. And from those I get two things: serious, long-trusted sources of legitimate news and a verification or not of that news (they all, too, make mistakes sometimes).

We the people grant the license to lie by submitting ourselves to the simple-minded pleasure of the commercial/entertainment con.

Would someone then retort that well, thats just the world we live in? Im sure. And my response would be that we used to live in a world where almost no one was educated or could read, then one where a good number were educated; and we used to live in an accepted, entrenched system of legalized slavery.

An old Chinese saying is: the beginning of wisdom is to call things by the right names. I submit that we should always start at the beginning.

Lyndon DoddsSan Antonio

Link:
Kobe, Tess and the Many Ways We Grieve - The New York Times

UK PM Boris Johnson is preparing to introduce full-fledged customs and border control of goods from the European Union, The Telegraph reported.

All Whitehall departments were instructed to implement a complete list of EU import checks.

This tough approach comes from Johnsons promise that Brexit will open a new exciting chapter in our great national drama.

And when I look at this countrys incredible assets, our scientists, our engineers, our world-leading universities, our armed forces, when I look at the potential of this country waiting to be unleashed, I know that we can turn this opportunity into a stunning success. And whatever the bumps in the road ahead, I know that we will succeed. We have obeyed the people, we have taken back the tools of self-government. Now is the time to use those tools to unleash the full potential of this brilliant country and to make better the lives of everyone in every corner of our United Kingdom, Reuters quoted the PM.

The UK officially left the EU on Friday.

Read more:
Media: UK is preparing to introduce full control of EU goods - Information-Analytic Agency NEWS.am