Social media cannot ensure they only publish truths. But what about deliberate falsehoods designed to damage?Are social media companies responsible for the lies their users tell? Both the obvious answers, “yes” and “no”, are clearly wrong. Complete responsibility is a bad idea, and impossible in practice: even in China, the home of the largest and most sophisticated censorship apparatus on the web, the internet is expected to slow down markedly in the coming weeks under the burden of combing through it to ensure that no references to the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre are published. And, as the Chinese example shows, there are also considerable difficulties that arise when any one organisation can decide what counts as truth or falsehood. Yet it can’t be right, either, to say that social media companies have no responsibility to exercise the powers they have to remove obnoxious material from their servers. Videos of murder, child abuse and other horrors are routinely and rightly removed. It will be objected that these are horrible precisely because they are not lies – they record things that really happened. But that doesn’t stand up. It is no defence, either in British law, or in any moral sense, to say that a video of atrocity is faked. If it works as propaganda for jihadis, or for child abusers, it will be censored and its originators punished if that’s possible.The platforms have been much more reluctant to act against lies which promote causes... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2019-05-27 17:25:07 UTC ]
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The giants of the scientific publishing industry have made huge profits for decades. Now they are under threatScientific publishing has long been a licence to print money. Scientists need journals in which to publish their research, so they will supply the articles without monetary reward. Other... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2019-03-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The story of Dan Mallory, aka the bestselling author AJ Finn, reads like a thriller. But it asks uncomfortable questions of the literary worldA true story worthy of a Patricia Highsmith thriller was published this week in the New Yorker. The magazine detailed the deceptions of Dan Mallory, who... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2019-02-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Corporate sponsorship needs to steer clear of impinging on artistic freedomsNews that investment managers the Man Group is withdrawing its sponsorship from the Booker prize after 18 years has shocked the literary world. The hedge fund’s decision to move on was linked in the press to novelist... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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These days, most writers cannot afford to live secluded from their public. But when a very private author like Thomas Harris announces a new novel, there’s always special excitementAuthors – at least as far as their relationship with the public goes – fall into several distinct categories. There... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2018-10-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Martin Lewis is suing Facebook. The question is whether companies can be held responsible for the behaviour of their softwareMartin Lewis, the consumer advice and money-saving expert, is suing Facebook in a case that threatens the dominant business model of publishing on the internet. It raises... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2018-04-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The standards by which the internet is controlled need to be open and subject to impartial judiciaries – not left to advertisersThe revelations we publish about how Facebook’s data was used by Cambridge Analytica to subvert the openness of democracy are only the latest examples of a global... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2018-03-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The news that the music weekly will no longer appear in print is unsurprising. Where should we look for the sense of excitement it once offered?It would be silly to mourn the demise of NME, which is closing its print edition after 66 years, maintaining only its painful digital existence. This is... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2018-03-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Stories should come from all parts of society – not just from the well heeled and the middle classLiterary fiction, you might think, is in wonderful health. Book festivals, from Edinburgh and Wigtown in Scotland, to Hay-on-Wye in Wales, to Cheltenham and Bath in England, are flourishing. There... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2017-12-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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London book fair has shown how upbeat the literary world can be – and how worried our cultural businesses have become at the thought of losing old certaintiesThe mood at this week’s London book fair appeared upbeat, with hotly contested auctions leading to the return of the six-figure publishing... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2017-03-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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It may not prove easy to marry British and Japanese journalistic cultures. But in a global media world this deal makes senseThe Financial Times is one of the best newspapers in the world, not just in Britain. It is quick without being rash, accurate without leaden pedantry, thoughtful without... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-07-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The readiness of juries to defend public interest journalism is good news. But the press should be more transparent about payments to sources for storiesThe case of the Sun journalists charged with paying public officials for information has been a troubling one in many respects. It is, we... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-03-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Can a one-size-fits-all, low-price, consumer-dominated sales model support a diverse, innovative, challenging literary output?It is either an existential threat to intellectual freedom or a rustbelt media industry meeting its comeuppance at the hands of disruptive technology. The battle between... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-08-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook is running an experiment to hide "like" counts and other public-facing social scores in select markets. The social network confirmed Friday that it started hiding like, reaction and video view counts in a limited test across the social network as part of an effort to improve the... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2019-09-27 20:39:27 UTC ]
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Facebook is running an experiment to hide "like" counts and other public-facing social scores in select markets. The social network confirmed Friday that it started hiding like, reaction and video view counts in a limited test across the social network as part of an effort to improve the... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2019-09-27 20:39:27 UTC ]
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David Cameron’s memoir, For the Record, hit the headlines this weekend as the publicity campaign for the former prime minister’s book gets underway. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-09-16 03:37:49 UTC ]
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The platform is increasing its focus on Groups, where algorithms will have even more influence on the content users see. Continue reading at Media Week
[ Media Week | 2019-05-29 13:15:44 UTC ]
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Biteback is to publish the "definitive insider account" of Theresa May’s time in power by historian Anthony Seldon. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-03-30 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook has admitted that it suspected Cambridge Analytica of scraping data from the platform even before the first reports about its massive data collection were published. The Guardian has learned about the social network's suspicion from a court... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2019-03-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The California State Teachers Retirement System, which carries a huge amount of stock market clout as the state’s second largest public pension fund, recently had some very harsh words for Facebook, one of its largest investments. In an op-ed published Wednesday in the Financial Times, Aeisha... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2018-05-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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As some publishers try to clean up rogue online advertising, the platform has been slow to act on complaints. Time for regulationOne of the ways Facebook has been able to get away with some pretty questionable behaviour over the years is that exploiting users’ data is an abstract problem that... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2018-04-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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