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Madonna has been accused of failing to credit and pay a songwriter on her 2019 album Madame X.

Casey Spooner, a member of the recently disbanded electronic pop group Fischerspooner, wrote on Instagram that he was co-writer of the track God Control. I have had enough Ive gotten no credit and no compensation while youre galavanting around on stage Im completely broke in Berlin. Robbed, ignored and delayed.

Spooner said he had been offered first $10,000, then $25,000 as an advance against future publishing royalties, but argued he should instead be paid 1% of touring profits There is no money in record sales. Period. Not even for Madonna. In a later Instagram post, he said: They are trying to intimidate me its not easy fighting giants.

Spooner says he worked with God Control producer Mirwais in 2017, for the latters solo album, which was later shelved. Elements of their work together later appeared in the Madonna track without his knowledge. He posted a demo version of God Control that he worked on, which features the same lyrics and melody as the Madonna track.

Madonna has not commented on the accusations. The Guardian has requested comment via her UK representatives.

God Control, a dance-pop track that confronts gun control in the US, has already provoked controversy. Its violent music video depicted an attack similar to the one on Orlandos Pulse nightclub in June 2016 that left 49 people dead, and was criticised as horrible by Parkland shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez.

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Madonna accused of failing to credit songwriter on Madame X album - The Guardian

Mozilla intends to block the DigiTrust consortium from tracking users in its Firefox browser, a blow for the IAB-led effort to create a standardized online user ID thats designed to reduce the online ad industrys reliance on third-party cookies.

DigiTrust, a non-profit acquired by the IAB Tech Lab last year, is working to create a universal, persistent and anonymized user ID. Member companiesinclude prominent ad tech players MediaMath, OpenX, LiveRamp and others. Buy-side DigiTrust members pay a monthly fee to participate, while publisher participants access the service for free.

Similar to other shared identity solutions, DigiTrust offers a pseudonymous and encrypted identifier that can be stored in a first-party cookie provided by the publisher. Other participants can utilize the same identifier on subsequent bid requests and user visits to that publishers site via the browser, instead of needing to submit third-party network requests each time a person loads a publishers webpage.

Theoretically, shared IDs using first-party cookies offer multiple benefits, such as quicker page-load times due to less third-party cookie-syncing behind the scenes. They can also mitigate the risk of data leaks in the bid-stream (a big concern as it relates to Europes General Data Protection Regulation.) Meanwhile, third-party cookies are increasingly being throttled by browsers.

The immediate impact of Firefoxs move to block DigiTrust isnt clear. Firefox only has a 4% share of the global browser market, according to Statcounter. Thats behind leading browsers, Googles Chrome (65%) and Apples Safari (16%), latter of which has sophisticated tracker prevention features. Still, its a setback on the quest toward a common ID solution.

IAB Tech LAB svp of Membership and Operations Jordan Mitchell said in an emailed statement that Firefoxs decision did not come as a surprise.

We know certain companies take the position that there is no sufficient consumer value to justify tracking anonymous audience recognition of any kind, not even for use in communicating privacy choices, Mitchell said. They believe no third party can be trusted. We take a different position: that trust should be established directly between consumers and the brands, and publishers they trust, and with the third parties that those brands and publishers trust.

He added, IAB Tech Lab will continue to work on improving mechanics for privacy and trust, through consumer privacy choices and system-level, industrywide accountability and we think theres value for DigiTrust as a shared resource and utility in this context.

An exclusive, inside look at whats actually happening in the video industry, including original reporting, analysis of important stories and interviews with interesting executives and other newsmakers.

Mozilla leans on an open-source list of trackers compiled by privacy software company Disconnect to inform its Enhanced Tracking Prevention feature, which was introduced in September.

On Nov. 11, John Wilander, an Apple WebKit engineer who works on Safaris ITP, filed an issue on Mozillas Bugzilla forum asking why Firefox did not treat the Digitru.st domain as a tracker. (Apple, which relies on machine learning rather than block lists, already prevents DigiTrust cross-site tracking on Safari.) The same day, Mozilla privacy engineer Steven Englehardtraised an issue on Disconnects developer forumasking whether DigiTrust should be added to the list.

We reviewed this issue in the normal course of business beginning that week and determined that although DigiTrusts service may not track users directly, which is why they were not previously blocked, they clearly enable other services to track, and therefore we updated our definition of tracking to encompass this type of behavior, which we see as a growing threat to consumer privacy, said Casey Oppenheim, Disconnect co-founder.

A Mozilla spokeswoman confirmed that cookie-based tracking for DigiTrust will be blocked in a future version of Firefox.

DigiTrust isnt the only player pushing for the adoption of a universal ID. LiveRamp and The Trade Desk are among the other organizations offering ID solutions. The Trade Desk and LiveRamp domains are also on Disconnects blocklist although LiveRamps ID solution doesnt rely on cookies.

Regulation could prove the bigger roadblock to universal ID solutions. The California Consumer Privacy Act takes effect in January and there is still a level of uncertainty in the ad tech industry as to exactly how the privacy law will apply to third-party cookies used for advertising. The U.K. data regulator has warned that the current real-time-bidding ad tech landscape is not compliant with the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation.

The industry seems to think there is a basic industry right for tracking and targeting of users for advertising purposes, but I dont see the regulators following this logic at all, said Ruben Schreurs, CEO of consulting firm Digital Decisions.

Meanwhile, Google is set to make an announcement in February about how it will treat third-party cookies in Chrome.

David Kohl, CEO of ad tech company TrustX, a member of DigiTrust, said the entire cookie-based advertising infrastructure needs a rethink that involves prioritizing consumer interests, rather than ad techs commercial interests.

We need to start again with a clean sheet and say, how do we create a capability for consumers to understand what identity means on the internet, how its used, and how to control it, Kohl said.

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Firefox browser will block the IABs DigiTrust universal ID - Digiday

For observers of the media, there are few spectacles more dispiriting than the way the press covers presidential campaigns. Rather than digging into what really matters, such as the candidates experience, leadership ability and positions on important issues, reporters focus on controversies, attacks on one another, gotcha moments and, of course, polls, polls and more polls.

Now a study conducted by the School of Journalism at Northeastern University has quantified just how bad things are. Looking at about 10,000 news articles from 28 ideologically diverse news outlets published between March and October, my colleagues and I found that coverage of the Democratic candidates tracks with the ebbs and flows of scandals, viral moments and news items.

Our findings were posted last week at Storybench, a vertical published by the School of Journalism that covers media innovation. The data analysis was performed by Aleszu Bajak with an assist from John Wihbey. Among the key points in our report:

The televised debates have driven some of the issues-based coverage. For instance, mentions of the candidates positions on immigration and health care increased during and immediately after the debates but then quickly subsided.

Kirsten Gillibrand made reproductive choice one of her signature issues and after she dropped out of the race, that issue faded from media coverage. Similarly, coverage of gun control was tied mainly to Beto ORourkes now-defunct campaign. LGBTQ rights and climate change have been virtually ignored.

The Ukraine story has dominated recently coverage of the Democratic candidates, with much of it focused on President Trumps false accusations that Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden acted corruptly.

Of course, to some extent the media cant help but be reactive. It would be irresponsible not to cover what the candidates are saying about themselves and each other. But the press urge to chase controversies at the expense of more substantive matters shows that little has been learned since its disastrous performance four years ago.

As Thomas Patterson of Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy wrote in an analysis of the 2016 campaign, coverage of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was unrelentingly negative, creating the impression that the controversy over Clintons emails was somehow equivalent to massive corruption at Trumps charitable foundation, his racist remarks and his boasting about sexual assault as revealed on the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

The real bias of the press is not that its liberal, Patterson wrote. Its bias is a decided preference for the negative.

It doesnt have to be that way. Earlier this year, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen proposed campaign coverage built around a citizens agenda. Rosen proposed that news organizations should identify their audience, listen to what they believe the candidates should be focusing on, and cover the race accordingly.

Given a chance to ask questions of the people competing for office, you can turn to the citizens agenda, Rosen wrote on his influential blog, Press Think. And if you need a way of declining the controversy of the day, there it is. The agenda you got by listening to voters helps you hold to mission when temptation is to ride the latest media storm.

Some coverage of presidential politics has been quite good. Quality news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have published in-depth articles on challenges the candidates have overcome and how that helps shape their approach to governing. The Boston Globe has been running a series called Back to the Battleground in which it has reported on four key states that unexpectedly went with Trump in 2016. Reports aimed at making sense of the Ukraine story, explaining Elizabeth Warrens Medicare for All plan and the like are worthy examples of campaign journalism aimed at informing the public. But such efforts tend to be overshadowed by day-to-day horse-race coverage.

The latest poll-driven narrative is the rise of Pete Buttigieg, whos emerged as the clear frontrunner in Iowa, according to a Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom survey. You can be sure that hell be watched closely at this weeks televised debate. Will his rivals attack him? Will he fight back? Can he take the heat?

Little of it will have much to do with what kind of president Buttigieg or any of the other candidates would be. The horse race is paramount. Whos up, whos down and the latest controversies are what matter to the political press.

The data my Northeastern colleagues have compiled provides a measurement of how badly political coverage has run off the rails. Whats needed is a commitment on the part of the media to do a better job of serving the public interest.

WGBH News contributor Dan Kennedys blog, Media Nation, is online at dankennedy.net.

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A Northeastern Study Takes The Measure Of Our Controversy-Driven, Poll-Obsessed Political Coverage - wgbh.org

The very nature of social media intermediaries prevents any neat separation of best parts from their worst. (Image: Getty/Thinkstock)

In 1996, the cyberlibertarian activist, poet and essayist John Perry Barlow pronounced a Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. He poignantly stated: We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Over two decades since, this seems nave. Worldwide scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, Russias 2016 US election meddling, YouTubes algorithmic propensity to serve up neo-Nazi propaganda and Twitters failure to police white supremacists, have progressively populated our news and conversations. In our own backyard, just recently, as the anti-Muslim #___ (total boycott of Muslims) continued to trend, Twitters silence was deafening. Virtual and real social spaces have tied themselves into knots of multiple and variegated levels. Let us not forget the power WhatsApp wields in channeling hate and fear mongering. In extreme cases, people have been killed by mobs as a result.

Online platforms, as defined by media studies scholars like Jos van Dijck and Thomas Poell, are socio-technical architectures to facilitate interaction and communication between users by collecting, processing, and circulating data. They make possible public activity outside the purview of government institutions, instrumentalising new terms or notions like participatory culture and the sharing or collaborative economy. Many scholars have highlighted the power of social media in empowering individuals and societies to effectively assume roles as producers of public goods and services, as well as to act as autonomous and responsible citizens. In his book Social Media: A Critical Introduction, Christian Fuchs, however, excavates how in capitalist societies, the Internet is controlled by people who primarily aim to monetise active users and commodify data. A participatory democracy, he argues, can never be truly so.

The Indian government, meanwhile, fearing unimaginable disruption to democratic polity, aims for a new set of Internet regulations by January 2020. With internet service providers, search engines and social media platforms, guidelines are being framed. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), in its affidavit filed with the Supreme Court, stated that although technology has led to economic growth and societal development, hate speech, fake news, public order, anti-national activities, defamatory postings, and other unlawful activities using internet/social media platforms have exponentially been on the rise.

Of many demands, MeitY proposes legal amendments asking intermediaries to trace origins of fake messages and locate them within 72 hours of any government agency requisitioning concerned information. Facebook and WhatsApp, with over 250 and 400 million active users each across India, are currently sparring with the Modi government over the irreconcilable dilemma of national security versus users privacy and freedom of speech. But, obviously, the Internet is not a purely national phenomenon. India is a reflection of what is already global unease. Legislations, policy briefs, debates and deliberations are underway across the world to devise the most effective model for online content management. The EU, for instance, addresses this through continent-wide measures like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or regional ones attempting to regulate social media companies role in spreading harmful content, to the relatively stronger penalty statutes on actors who are not compliant.

However, empirical evidence is stacked against efficacy of such measures. The question must then lie somewhere in how civil society appropriates social media. Until very recently, the onus of safeguarding public values was on government institutions. However, economic liberalisation and privatisation of public institutions and services, combined with the advancement of digital technologies and dominance of intermediaries for general purposes like social communication (Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp) to specific platforms in sectors like transportation and hospitality (Uber, Airbnb), demonstrates and, continues to foretell fundamental shifts. Service delivery aside, they transform peoples lives integrally. With these changes, the compositions of public values are altering not just individual self-interests, but also collective aspirations of societies.

The very nature of social media intermediaries prevents any neat separation of best parts from their worst. Although the whole world, including Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, agrees that there is a need for more government regulation of the Internet, no one knows how or to what extent. Major roadblocks exist in governments being able to safeguard democracy from social media rotting. Executive action still pending, however, contemporary scholarship has helped in bringing out some of the key obstacles to such action in the European context. Natali Helberger, Jo Pierson & Thomas Poell, for instance, discuss this in a 2017 article, when these concerns were on the rise. Such sustained and ongoing research is significant in, at least, providing valuable insights into the larger problem(s).

First, dominant online platforms are US-based transnational corporations. They take global architectural decisions, with the sole intention of commodification and datafication of peoples voices, which becomes the fodder for profits. Although these platforms pose as mere hosts or facilitators of circulated content, we need to be attentive to how they are vitally constitutive to generate public values. Their roles in constructing non-human infrastructures geared to enhance user engagement by spreading viral content, cannot be overlooked.

This brings out the second issue, the black-boxed nature of non-human architectures and underlying algorithms running them. From a user perspective, the selection process by algorithms occurs through techno-commercial strategies. Its opacity baffles experts struggling to successfully decipher why specific algorithms behave the way they do. This has prevented attempts to even identify or problematise, let alone solve, algorithmic bias. A seemingly simple solution would be complete transparency to ensure that the decisions being made can be independently evaluated. However, this is also untenable due to several social implications the loss of privacy of information generators or owners and, the darker possibility of algorithms being manipulated by certain groups to their own advantage. It, further, negates salability of algorithms for the often-for-profit companies that develop them.

Third, the instrumentalities of actions and impacts between users and platforms is entangled. Not just platforms, but also active users on them play a role in constructing or eroding of public values. However, it is clear that the power between users and platforms is unequal, not least because of the platforms internal, and invisible, murkiness. The question of where the responsibility of the platform ends and that of user starts is a notoriously difficult one. Users themselves determine and influence what kind of content they upload, share and choose to be exposed to, even if only through their selection of friends or reading behavior, which morph into fodder for a platforms algorithms. In other words, many problems with diversity or consumer protection on online platforms are, at least to an extent, user driven. For similar reasons, at least part of the remedy potentially lies with the users.

In conclusion, there is a need for cooperative responsibility in the realisation of public values in societal sectors, centered on online platforms. Governments alone can never come up with magic-bullet solutions. It is exigent to be conscious of social mores or responsibilities for the realisation of key public values, such as respect for diversity and civility, across stakeholders platforms, governments and users. Shrill cries for transparency cannot even begin to dismantle such a complex issue. However, thinking about ways to best implement a culture of tolerance, transparency and accountability, offline through modes like education and interpersonal civic orientation could be a vital step in the right direction.

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Can governments control social media? Or can users? - The Indian Express

Democracy is in trouble, despite popular uprisings and dynamic social movements in Lebanon, Hong Kong and across Europe and Latin America.

Scholars say countries across the globe are experiencing a rise in autocratic rule, with declines in democratic ideals and practice. Autocratic rule also known as authoritarianism is when one leader or political party exercises complete power to govern a country and its people.

The year 2008 was when democracy peaked, according to a prominent democracy advocacy group, Freedom House. Thats when the world had the highest percentage ever of fully free countries, at 46.1%.

That declined to 44.1% in 2018, though full or partial democracy is still the most common form of governance.

Definitions of democracy vary. All citizens in a democracy have the ability to vote in elections, which should be free and fair. Independent media, freedom of speech and assembly and the rule of law feature in most contemporary perceptions of democracy.

Democratic declines are most notable in the regions with the worlds largest concentration of democracies. That includes Europe, North America and Latin America.

One example: The United States in 2018 was rated a flawed democracy, dropping from 21st to 25th place among 167 countries and territories.

In the old days, autocrats often came to or retained power through military coups and violent crackdowns. Now the shift from democracy to autocracy is slower and less obvious.

While control over security forces remains essential in the autocratic playbook, overt strong-arm tactics arent.

I spent more than 15 years with the United Nations, where I advised governments and democracy advocates on how to strengthen the rule of law, human rights and democratic governance. Im now a scholar of international law.

Ive learned that todays leaders with authoritarian tendencies arent just interested in using brute force to rise to power.

They are smarter, more resilient and can adjust their methods to take account of new developments, like modern technologies and a globalized economy.

Here are some of the newest tactics used by would-be authoritarians:

The mainstay of todays authoritarianism is strengthening your power while simultaneously weakening government institutions, such as parliaments and judiciaries, that provide checks and balances.

The key is to use legal means that ultimately give democratic legitimacy to the power grab. Extreme forms of this include abolishing presidential term limits, which was done in China; and regressive constitutional reforms to expand presidential power, like in Turkey.

Restrictions on funding and other bureaucratic limitations silence the ability of the people to hold accountable those in power. More than 50 countries have passed laws that stifle citizen groups. Democracies have also jumped on this bandwagon. Limitations on permits for public protest, detention of protesters and excessive use of force to break up demonstrations are frequently used tools.

Economic growth and prosperity are critical to retaining elite or oligarchical support for autocratic leaders. Whether through state-owned businesses, media conglomerates or more sophisticated connections between governments and free-market corporations, money and politics, translated into government favors for the rich, can be a toxic mix for democracy.

Ironically, popular distaste with elite corruption is so high that modern autocratic populists, such as President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, have even risen to power on anti-corruption promises.

Most would-be autocratic leaders today exploit existing tensions within complex societies in order to solidify their support.

In many places, fears of migrants and refugees have fueled resurgent nationalism, driving policies like U.K.s Brexit. In India, religiously based nationalism has maintained the power of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Blaming external forces for a countrys problems, such as Hungarian leader Viktor Orbans demonization of George Soros, a Hungarian-born philanthropist who supports democracy-building, is also common.

While propaganda and state-owned media is not new, control of modern technology and information has become a key battleground.

China has developed sophisticated technologies to censor and prevent the circulation of unwanted information and to track individuals in society.

Russia is at the vanguard of state media control at home while generating misinformation abroad. Many smaller countries have used internet blackouts to block organizing and communicating by social movements.

Damaging the opposition parties, while not completely destroying them, is now essential. Infiltrating parties, co-opting members and using pure scare tactics are some possible actions in the autocrats playbook. This serves the purpose of retaining a target for pseudo-political competition while also stymieing the potential for new, more democratic forces to gain traction.

Mostly gone are the days of vote-rigging and vote-buying as a path to power. Would-be autocrats have found cleverer ways to tilt the playing field in their favor. These new tactics include hampering media access, gerrymandering, changing election and voter eligibility rules and placing allies on electoral commissions.

Some autocratic leaders continue to use traditional strong-arm tactics, like declaring states of emergency, to enable further repression.

Since 2001, using the threat of terrorism or organized crime has played well for furthering autocratic rule. President Rodrigo Dutertes drug war, which seems to have resulted in thousands dead in the Philippines, is one illustration.

Since an attempted coup in 2016 up until 2018, for example, Turkey was under a state of emergency which enabled President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to jail and persecute academics, government officials, media and human rights advocates.

Todays autocratic rulers are not keeping to themselves.

Using the international stage and their growing economic prowess, countries like China are spreading their influence through funding initiatives such as the Belt and Road to build infrastructure across Asia to Europe. Theyre hiring professional consultants to advise and lobby foreign capitals for policies that reinforce their power.

Characterized as autocratic learning by scholars, national authorities from Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Belarus, Syria and other places are developing and exchanging models for containing threats of social movements and the so-called color revolutions.

International meetings and intergovernmental clubs can provide a platform for exchange. For example, Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia has successfully rallied neighbor governments to help oppress opposition to his rule using the regional organization ASEAN. Government officials in Malaysia recently blocked Cambodian opposition members from returning to their country via Malaysia.

Some experts claim the world is at a tipping point where decreasing faith in democracy will drive the dominance of autocracy globally.

The social movements of today inspire some hope that civil society a key ingredient for democracy though under pressure, is fighting the trend.

Nonetheless, strengthening democracy across the globe will prove impossible if even the most established democracies today fall prey to the tactics of would-be autocrats.

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So you want to be an autocrat? Here's the 10-point checklist - The Conversation US