[21:57, 22/03/2022] Tony Gosling, Journalist: the Bill’s provisions to block websites, apps, or services which refuse to cooperate with the speech regulator’s orders could put household names like Wikipedia, Reddit and Tumblr in the crosshairs. https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaig ... ne-speech/
[22:08, 22/03/2022] Tony Gosling, Journalist: The report’s findings were met with agreement from the Society of Editors who said that the government’s proposals failed to account for the “fast nature of today’s news process”. One of the concerns shared by the committee, the Society and others is that the bill creates a duty of care for tech giants that could see them put in place new algorithms to remove harmful content from their platforms. The worry is that those algorithms could inadvertently remove journalistic reporting and content alongside actually harmful posts, unless specific rules are included in the bill to prevent this. https://pressgazette.co.uk/online-safet ... of-speech/
TonyGosling wrote:2021 World Press Freedom Index: Journalism, the vaccine against disinformation, blocked in more than 130 countries
https://rsf.org/en/2021-world-press-fre ... -countries
WORSE
China (177th), which continues to take Internet censorship, surveillance and propaganda to unprecedented levels, is still firmly anchored among the Index’s worst countries, which are indicated in black on the World Press Freedom map. Right below China is the same trio of totalitarian countries that have historically occupied the bottom three places. Two are Asian: Turkmenistan (up 1 at 178th) and North Korea (up 1 at 179th). The third is African: Eritrea (down 2 at 180th). Regardless of their continent, these countries maintain absolute control over all news and information, enabling the first two to claim they had no Covid-19 cases and the third to maintain complete silence about the fate of 11 journalists who were arrested 20 years ago, some of whom have allegedly been held in metal containers in the middle of a desert.
The country that fell the furthest in 2021 was Malaysia (down 18 at 119th), where the problems include a recent “anti-fake news” decree allowing the government to impose its own version of the truth. Big descents were also registered by Comoros (down 9 at 84th) and El Salvador (down 8 at 82nd), where journalists have struggled to obtain state-held information about the government’s handling of the pandemic. Most of the 2021 Index’s biggest gains are in Africa. Burundi (up 13 at 147th), Sierra Leone (up 10 at 75th) and Mali (up 9 at 99th) have all seen significant improvements, including the release of four journalists with the independent Burundian media Iwacu, the repeal of a law criminalising press offences in Sierra Leone and a fall in the number of abuses in Mali.