US Supreme Court permits FCC to relax media ownership rules
Hi everyone, Last week, the US Supreme Court ruled in favour of allowing the FCC to loosen ownership restrictions on local media, partly on the grounds that the long-standing restrictions no longer served the public interest. You can read the article here: https://www.reuters.com/article/BigStory12/idUSKBN2BO5S4 On one hand, one could argue that the restrictions that were relaxed […]
UK anti-trust probes Facebook practices
Hello Class, I was compelled by a short article in today’s Vancouver Sun about how the UK’s competition regulator has begun investigating Facebook’s practices. While looking further into this issue, I encountered a report posted in SIlicon Angle by MARIA DEUTSCHER. In summary, Facebook is being investigated over its alleged anti-trust practices. One concern by […]
Drawbacks of Automated Web Content Moderation
DoorDash Spent $5.5 Million To Advertise Their $1 Million Charity Donation from nottheonion This is a little bit of a throwback to the week of the Super Bowl but I thought that this event was a little too juicy to pass up writing on for a post. For their Super Bowl ad, DoorDash spent $5.5 […]
Google announces its intention to move away from all forms of third-party identifiers
Hello Class, Earlier this week, Google announced that it intends to move away from third-party cookie trackers in response to an “erosion of trust”. This move will fundamentally impact digital advertising. Where current practices allow companies to track a user’s online activity to the extent of collecting their personal information, Google now strives to achieve […]
Soundcloud’s new royalty model
Soundcloud announced today its new ‘fan-powered royalties’ model. Unlike the current industry model which pools revenues and pays based on total number of streams, the new fan-powered model distributes royalties based on revenue from fans/users directly to the artists that they streamed. Prior to reading about this I was not aware that there was such […]
Australia passes law forcing Google and Facebook to pay news publications
Building on the earlier post on this topic, I wanted to keep talking about this because it is interesting and will probably influence Canadian legislation. For context, some highlights from the c net article linked below: – Following a new Australian bill, “Google and Facebook are required to negotiate licensing agreements with publishers for the […]
California district judge allows state to preserve net neutrality
https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/23/22298199/california-net-neutrality-law-sb822 Net neutrality took a beating in the states a few years ago, and though California largely repaired the law at a state level it was prevented from enforcing it by various lawsuits from the telecom industry. A new decision by district judge John Mendez just denied the final injunction standing in California’s way. Whether […]
Apologies
Further to Professor Festinger’s unwillingness to accept facebooks repeated privacy violations and hackneyed apologies, I wanted to look at organizational responses to public outcry. The article I found is out of the Harvard Business Review is a step-by-step guide: https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-organizational-apology. A quote I found especially interesting: “For many years, medical professionals were advised not to […]
Flipboard: The greatest App on my iPhone
I was filling out Christine’s survey re: Misinformation and thought I should share this with you all before I forget. During the Trump debacle, I was frustrated with how to go about sourcing news articles. I found it easy enough to google CNN/ABC/etc but I still wanted to see what other, less familiar, articles were […]
Facebook restores access to news pages in Australia after a week-long blackout
Hi class, Building on the most recent News of the Week over Facebook’s decision to blackout access to both Australian news on the international scale and news pages on Facebook in Australia, an agreement has been reached between Facebook and the Australian Government. To summarize, Australia has been at the forefront of the news recently […]
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