Weekly New/Digital Media (59)

Amber Rudd's 'showdown' talks with tech firms on extremism are pure PR

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/30/uk-government-tech-firms-extremism-pr-win-facebook-amber-rudd

Summary:

"Meetings between UK government and Facebook et al are more ritual than battle as they avoid subjects both parties disagree on, such as tax and user privacy" 

They are suggesting that these media companies are actually happy about being another 'battle ground'(in regards to the extremist content) as they both have previous experience. "Neither the government nor the social networks – in this case represented by Facebook, Google, Twitter and, oddly, Microsoft, but not Apple – want pro-Isis material sitting on the open net for anyone to read. All agree that the systems in place need improvement and all are working on better models and definitions to help precisely identify extremist content and remove it rapidly." One of the main stages of conversation is the combination of the government and these media institutions working together potentially to overcome this issue. "That is very different from other, more divisive, disagreements, like those over how much tax should be paid in which jurisdiction, the extent to which giant technology firms have, and abuse, monopoly power, or the tension between the revenue sources of social media companies and the personal privacy of their users." 

 

Key facts/ statistics: 

• Technology firms, perhaps reasonably, object that to do so would turn them into judge, jury and executioner over content that is for the most part legal, if unpleasant
• China to prevent social media users discussing the Tiananmen Square protests, fail in the face of human ingenuity at coming up with synonyms and allegory. For evidence, take a look at the American far right, which decided to use the product names of tech companies in place of ethnic slurs: “kill all the Skypes”, for instance.
• much more at stake for the technology companies if they lose the argument
• No government wants to be perceived as “anti-tech”: to do carries connotations somewhere in between “anti-business” and “anti-success”.
• That pro-technology attitude is helped by what can be seen as a rotating door between government and the upper echelons of the technology industry, in both the UK and US.
• Not only is there not really time to hammer out a carefully considered bill on hate speech now that Brexit is likely to dominate the agenda for the foreseeable future, but doing so would open the government up to questions that it doesn’t really want to have to answer.
• Questions like “what actually constitutes extremist material?”, “How can you write a bill that limits what can be said on social media without also affecting what can be printed by the British press?”, and “Won’t any bill serve to concentrate yet more power on the large tech firms, who are the only ones with the resources to actually implement such filters?” No government will want to bring these upon its own head when all it was looking for was a PR win

My opinion: 

I do agree with the article completely i feel that these media institutions are profit maximising organisations who want a lot of market power which can only come through having a lot of awareness and in order to have that the organisations need a lot of PR to remain in discussion.