COMMENT BLOG
A remark, a critique, an opinion…
In the battle of giants, who to root for?
The tech headlines in the past week have marked the growing data privacy battle between Apple and Facebook. The latest update to iPads and iPhones includes an App Tracking Transparency feature which will force app developers to ask users permission to collect their...
Global tax reforms and communication rights
Do current shifts in economic thinking represent an opportunity for communication rights? On April 5th, United States Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen issued a call for a global corporate tax rate, a major shift from the neoliberal consensus that has...
Trust is a two-way street
The theme of WACC’s annual report for 2020 is “Truthful Voices Matter”. What appears to be self-evident reflects a growing perception that public interest media need to rebuild trust in their news content and opinions: by demonstrating impartiality, balance, and...
Digital justice, still waiting in the wings
Everyone agrees that social media are failing to distinguish between truth and lies. That’s partly because the line is easily blurred, but also because social media are corporate entities running on profit. Few people agree on how to tackle the problem of fake news or...
#IWD 2021: Achieving an equal future in a Covid-19 world
March, the month set aside to honour women's contributions to American history is today commemorated worldwide as "Women's history month". Achieving an equal future in a Covid-19 world is the theme of International Women's Day March 8. If there's anything that a...
Unmoored from the truth: Holding social media to account
The Washington Post (2 February 2021) reported, “Former president Donald Trump lost the 2020 election largely due to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a post-election autopsy completed by Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio. The 27-page document...
Time to regain public trust in the media
American citizens are not alone in realising that press freedom is under attack. Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Brazilians and Filipinos – to name just a few – are also deeply concerned. They can all learn from PEN America which has put forward An Agenda for the...
Argentina: Making Access to Communication more Affordable
Affordability a major hurdle in ensuring equitable access Today, access to the internet and mobile phones is critical for people everywhere. Still, 40% of the world’s population has no access to the internet[i], with countries such as India (50%), Ethiopia (81%), and...
Silencing Trump, preserving free speech?
Following the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter, followed by other online platforms, suspended and then banned President Donald Trump’s accounts due, as Twitter put it, “due to the risk of further incitement of...
New Year, new digital responsibilities
Last year – and even as recently as January 6, 2021 – saw anti-democratic tendencies and misinformation magnified by social media in several countries, contributing to near breakdowns in the rule of law. It is time for stringent regulation of social media companies...
Remembering the past to reimagine the future
Cloud storage and hard drives are today’s scrapbooks, records, and memories. In his book delete (2009), Viktor Mayer-Schönberger explored “The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age”. He writes, “As humans we do not travel ignorantly through time. With our capacity...
Empowering women by tackling online harassment and abuse
Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 says, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words, online...
PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Jeffrey/ACT Alliance