European copyright reform, the invincibility of U.S. tech giants, and the ease of faking news.

Friday, January 06, 2017      Future Media Lab.       0

Continuing with our bi-weekly news roundup, Karin Fleming shares the news that caught her eye over the last two weeks. The news round-up is a way for the Future Media Lab. team and members of the Future Media Lab. network to share articles about innovations and developments in the media sector, including references to relevant media policy debates. To get this round-up sent directly to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter!

Here are Karin's choices for this week:

On the agenda in 2017: European copyright reform. This year promises to be a busy year for debates, hearings and legislative progress on the controversial EU copyright reform, which will be kicked-off with an EPP hearing on copyright. The EU’s copyright legislation has not been updated since 2001, and therefore no longer reflects the realities of the digital age. In September, the European Commission published a proposal that included a related right for press publishers, which will afford publishers the same related rights already enjoyed by music, film and software program producers without impacting the everyday sharing of links or articles by members of the general public.

The invincibility of tech giants. There are five tech giants that make up half of the world’s 10 most valuable companies, whose wealth is largely based on their control of the digital infrastructure: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet (Google’s parent company). These companies have largely spent the last years playing the role of disrupters, and thus have been encouraged and protected as such. But now, as we move into 2017, these technology giants seem to have moved to an incumbent role – yet the upcoming disruptions – cloud services, artificial intelligence, data mining, VR, etc – are being developed and competed against within the big five. This will lead to a number of battles being fought between governments and the big five in the next 12 months. In Europe, specifically, Google is facing antitrust charges, Apple is appealing its €13 billion tax bill, Facebook is facing privacy investigations in France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, and Amazon is waiting for the results of an investigation into unfair tax treatment in Luxembourg.

The fight against fake news. Various European countries are preparing themselves to take a harder stand against fake news in the new year. Germany’s coalition government has threatened to put forward legislation this year that would impose hefty fines on social media platforms for publishing fake news stories if they are not deleted and/or corrected within a set time frame. Edward Lucas, senior vice president at the Center for European Policy Analysis and senior editor at The Economist, says that in order to combat fake news Germany should look to Central and Eastern Europe, where Russian ‘information warriors’ were already spreading alarmist, plagiarized or falsified news already in the early 1990s. In the Czech Republic, a new “anti-fake news” unit has been set-up as from the 1 January to tackle the spread of falsehoods by Russian propagandists. The specialists will not only scrutinize disinformation and attempt to counter it, they will also train civil servants to avoid blackmail and resist foreign lobbying. The efforts of this unit will be increasingly important in the run-up to the October elections, as disinformation campaigns have led to public fears of terrorism and migrants.

What you don’t know won’t hurt you? A recent article in ProPublica exposed how much data Facebook is really collecting on its users, particularly data that is purchased from commercial data brokers about users’ offline lives. Additionally, while Facebook provides links to some of their providers, the opt-out process is so complex – often requiring official IDs or postal mail – and the providers change so often that it’s nearly impossible to completely protect one’s data. Want to find out more about what Facebook thinks you like? ProPublica has also created an extension for Google Chrome that collects the categories Facebook has placed you in.

Saving the Media. French economist Julia Cagé puts forward a bold new business model to solve the media crisis hitting Europen and America in her recent book “Saving the Media: Capitalism, Crowdfunding and Democracy.” While met with criticism in terms of her model of the nonprofit media organization which embraces government subsidies and paywalls, Cagé does hone in on what has caused the distrust the public has with today’s media, including the disconnection between journalists and the public, the casualization of journalism as a profession, and changes in media ownership.

Publishers’ ambivalent relationship with Google’s AMP. When Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages was introduced in October 2015 it promised to speed up the load time of mobile web pages. While it seems to have delivered, many publishers are taking a step backward, saying that they worry about giving too much control to Google in exchange for faster load times. Much of this dissatisfaction is due to the fact that AMP stories are presented as if they are Google articles, with the address bar displaying www.google.com... as opposed to the publisher’s address. While publishers are able to control the content and design, and they have access to a full accounting of traffic, data and advertising revenue, the outsized influence of Google online has aroused suspicion of how AMP operates.

Medium still searching for new publishing model. On Wednesday, Medium announced that it would be laying off nearly a third of its staff and closing its New York and Washington D.C. offices. The announcement came as a surprise to everyone - including the publishers on the site - and it's not yet clear the extent this change will impact their businesses, though it will mean that some of the tools formerly offered, such as advertising arranged through the site, will no longer be available. Ev Williams, the CEO of Medium, said that while they are "shifting our resources and attention to defining a new models....it is too soon to say exactly what they will look like." In the meantime, the publishers currently on the platform seem to be stuck treading water.

Is LinkedIn free from fake news? Daniel Roth, executive editor of LinkedIn, talks about why he thinks the wave of fake news that has hit other social media sites has largely missed LinkedIn. Part of this he attributes to the ‘human editors’ that create, curate and cultivate content, but he also says that the atmosphere on the site also plays a role. Politics in general have a much less prominent place on the site, with the focus being more on business news and updates. “When you write or share or comment on LinkedIn, your boss sees it, your employees see it, your future business partners see it,” he said. “So people tend to be much more careful about what they say.”

Faking news is getting easier . As technology advances artificial intelligence will make the visual components of fake news much easier to create: from editing human speech and mapping facial expressions on video to faking images and captions. While Photoshopped images are hardly rare, the spread of AI will eventually enable anyone to doctor a photo or video as easily as editing a Word document. And while low resolution and weird composition enable people to spot faked news now, with technological advances it will only get harder to spot. Jeff Clune, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Wyoming says that when “people send me real images…I start to wonder if they look fake. And when they send me fake images I assume they’re real because the quality is so good. Increasingly, I think, we won’t know the difference between the real and the fake. It’s up to people to try and educate themselves.”

*** NOTE: Fake news will be discussed at the Future Media Lab. annual conference, taking place on 2-3 May 2017 in Brussels. Save the date! ***