Jeff Jarvis

Then I was asked to join a Transatlantic High-Level Working Group on Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression organized by former FCC commissioner Susan Ness under the auspices of Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center and the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law. Note that our group’s remit was to look at disinformation, hate speech, and other unacceptable behavior alongside protection of freedom of expression and assembly and not at other issues, such as copyright — though especially after the disastrous Articles 11+13 in Europe’s new copyright legislation, that is a field that is crying for due process. There was also much discussion about the burden regulation puts on small companies — or larger companies in smaller countries — raising the barrier to entry and making big companies, which have the lawyers and technologists needed to deal with regulation, only bigger and more powerful. Proposing the covenants internet companies should make with their users, the public at large, and government — and what behavior they demand from and will enforce with users — could be a useful way to hold a discussion about what we expect from platforms.

Our first duty now is to teach students to use the tools the net brings them to listen before they create; to observe communities and markets and their needs and desires; to seek out communities they have not known; to empathize with those communities; to reflect what they learn back to the public so they check themselves; to collaborate with the public; to serve truth, especially when uncomfortable. We need to convene communities in conflict into civil, informed, and productive conversation (that is my new working definition of journalism and a mission all media and internet companies should share). Education is a critical skill if we want to teach the public things they need to know for their own lives and things they need to know to manage their communities. In Social Journalism, for example, students taught me I was wrong to send them off to find a singular community to serve; every one of them showed me how their journalism is needed where communities — plural — interact: journalism at the points of friction.

The Cairncross Review of the state of journalism and the net in the UK.The House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee Disinformation and ‘Fake News’ report. In her code of conduct, platforms should not impose their ad platforms on publishers — but if publishers want revenue from the platforms they pretty much have to. The committee calls for holding social media companies — “which is not necessarily either a ‘platform’ or a ‘publisher’,” the report cryptically says — liable for “content identified as harmful after it has been posted by users. The report worries about the “pernicious nature of micro-targeted political adverts” and quotes the Coalition for Reform in Political Advertising recommending that “all factual claims used in political ads be pre-cleared; an existing or new body should have the power to regulate political advertising content.

I believe we can and must build new models for journalism based on real value, understanding people’s needs and motives so we can serve them. though time is a diminishing asset) or unique value (which inevitably means a limited audience of people who can make money on that value) or loyalty and quality (yes, the strategy is working wellfor The New York Times because it is the fucking New York Times I advocated a membership strategy for The Guardian but when its readers said they didn’t want a paywall because they wanted to support The Guardian’s journalism for the good of society, it became evident that the relationship was actually charity or contribution. While I know a lot of journalists disagree, I don’t think Facebook or Google did anything untoward: what happened to publishers was that the Internet made their business models — both print advertising and digital advertising — fundamentally unviable.