This week…
I take a small ‘mid-season break’ so there is no new interview with this issue. Instead, I (went strawberry picking and) worked on improving the About Section of The Starting Block, incorporating a section on my ethics policy. The reality is, putting together the master post on fact-checking and online privacy over the last few weeks made me examine my own principles in curating this newsletter. On that note, as promised, I updated the master post on fact-checking with the final section, on online privacy:
We’ll be back to our regular programming next week. Here’s what to expect for the next few weeks (in no particular order):
a Youtuber provides insights into what it means to be a content creator,
a transdisciplinary academic discusses the relationship between Malaysia’s democracy and its social media spaces, and,
a critic weighs in on the alleged lack of intellectual discourse in Malay.
Meanwhile, you can catch up on all the previous interviews on The Sidelines below or let me know if you would like to come on the show. And as usual, here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
CORRECTION NOTICE: In last week’s edition, there was a grammatical error in the introduction and the link to the second story was broken. Thank you to readers who immediately alerted me. These have been corrected in the web version.
Our creaky social media policies are no match for today’s trolls
“When newsroom social media policies were first crafted, most employees didn’t have much of a public record to peruse,” wrote Bill Grueskin for CJR. As newsrooms rethink their social media policies now, they have to come to grips with today’s reality:
At their core, social media policies are about reputations—of individual journalists, to be sure, but also of the news organizations that are employing them. While most newsrooms understand that their reporters are thinking, sentient human beings, they have a harder time dealing with the idea that those same people want to express their views to the world. As [Emily] Wilder told me, “Being transparent could only increase our credibility, rather than pretending like we’re automatons.”
Bill C-10’s efforts to regulate Canadian content at odds with net neutrality?
Fenwick McKelvey for IRPP’s Policy Option:
C-10 has all the hallmarks of net neutrality, but none of the substance. The bill tasks Canada’s media regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), with reining in the web giants the same way it decided which channels should receive special treatment in your cable package. C-10 leaves the definition of internet broadcasting open to CRTC interpretation and, most problematically, does little to modernize the CRTC’s public mandate. It does too little, and too much, at the same time.
Three Iraqi women explain how and why they stay anonymous online
Sofia Barbarani for Rest of World:
Although no official figures exist, many Iraqi women in their 20s and early 30s make use of avatars and pseudonyms to navigate the online world. Marwa Abdul-Redha Elewee, a lawyer who specializes in advising women who suffer online harassment and blackmailing in Iraq, said that social media has created women with “split personalities.” Online they speak freely and fearlessly, explained Elewee, while in real life “they are introverted.”
Cloaked in anonymity, Iraqi women are stepping out of the domestic sphere and joining the country’s male-dominated public discourse to voice their opinions on everything from politics and women’s rights to love and literature.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading A New Deal for Journalism, a report by the Forum on Information and Democracy in response to “the worsening international crisis facing the economic viability of independent professional journalism everywhere.”
I’m watching Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, on how sponsored content could damage the integrity of local news.
I’m listening to CIGI’s Big Tech podcast with Bellingcat’s founder Elliot Higgins. In this episode, he discusses using publicly available online data as a new form of intelligence gathering for citizen journalists.
I’m making strawberry jam, maybe later.
Chart of the week
From Adrian Rauchfleisch and Jonas Kaiser’s new pre-print, Deplatforming the far-right: An analysis of YouTube and BitChute. The analysis shows that deplatforming is effective in minimising the reach of disinformation and extreme speech because alternative platforms “cannot mitigate the negative effect of being deplatformed.”