The 71st Block: A lot of yelling about nothing
Free speech debate, indifference about the news, what else is new
This week…
My dog was having diarrhoea but is on the mend now. The other good news is she now knows how to use her bathroom.
More importantly, the Canadian federal leaders’ English debate was… strange. But my money is on Jody Wilson-Raybould. That’s how it works, right?
Anyway, here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Laws to limit tech giants in Brazil, Texas…
…But not the way we want it.
According to two BBC reports, in Brazil, “President Jair Bolsonaro has signed a decree aimed at restricting the powers of social media companies to remove accounts and content.” That includes his social media posts that claim he will only lose the next election if it was rigged.
Similar, the US state of Texas made it illegal to ban users “based on their political viewpoints,” due to come to effect in December. In May, neighbouring state Florida, banned social media from de-platforming politicians, but some parts of that bill were suspended by a federal judge.
How “free speech” kills Internet regulation debates
Blayne Haggart and Natasha Tusikov in the second part of three commentaries in this series for CIGI:
This idea of a free and open internet in which free speech is the guiding principle is evident in social media companies’ self-portrayal. They sell themselves as mere technical, passive “intermediaries” facilitating interactions among users, thereby downplaying the extent to which they themselves create a heavily structured and content-curated environment, in pursuit of profit. Even though they are only companies that use the network of the internet — they’re not the internet itself — and even though their algorithms, by definition, order and present content in a way that’s just as “unnatural” as anything a government could propose, they’ve co-opted this ideology to the extent that regulation of their activities is seen as an attack on the internet itself.
However, as we’ve seen countless times over the past couple of decades, unfettered connections and interoperability themselves create problems.
Overcoming indifference: what attitudes towards news tell us about building trust
A four-country, four-continent study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism concluded that the people who “generally lack trust in news are not necessarily the most vocal and angry” but indifferent.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading how Canada ended Joyanta Acharjee’s decade-long career in journalism — and reckoning with the possibility that it would happen to me too.
I’m watching Bailey Sarian’s Murder, Mystery & Makeup series.
I’m listening to Bad Blood: The Final Chapter, by John Carreyrou, who broke the story about the Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal, wrote a book about it, and now has a podcast series on it.
Chart of the week
Some interesting charts from the Reuters Institute study above, including this one: