Digital Digest – 23 July

In this week’s Digital Digest, we look at Channel 4’s latest ‘Super Human’ campaign and a House of Lords Committee’s plans for greater cooperation between social media companies and law enforcement.

We then take a look at big tech, with Facebook being accused of failing to combat COVID-19 misinformation and Anne-Marie launching her new album on TikTok.

Closer To Home

Channel 4 aims to provoke with Tokyo 2020 ‘Super Human’ campaign

Channel 4 has released its campaign for the 2020 Paralympic Games, focusing on the daily struggles facing elite athletes as they fight to make it to Tokyo.

This is the third iteration of the Superhumans campaign, which Channel 4 first unveiled ahead of the 2012 Paralympics. Following the success of ‘Meet the Superhumans’, Channel 4 launched its ‘We’re the Superhumans’ campaign to promote its coverage of the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games.

In a first for Channel 4, More 4 will act as a dedicated team sports channel live from Tokyo.

Lords Committee calls for social media companies to fund police to capture online trolls 

The Lords’ Communications and Digital committee issued a warning to the Government that the coming Duty of Care laws could usher in a ‘wave of censorship’ if tech companies are ordered to take down too much content deemed harmful, even if it is technically legal.

The committee has called for a ‘polluter pays’ levy that would see social networks like Twitter and Facebook providing funding to the police in an effort to catch online trolls. They also called for a legal requirement to force social media companies to preserve deleted posts for a period of time that helps officers investigating crimes being committed on social media.

Big Tech

Facebook in the spotlight as experts say vaccine misinformation remains rampant on the platform

Facebook is under fire once again over the proliferation of vaccine misinformation on its platform. This comes after Joe Biden said tech giants such as Facebook are “killing people” for failing to tackle the problem.

Experts say these posts are particularly prevalent on Spanish-language Facebook – an area of the platform Facebook is accused of not devoting enough resources to moderating.

Biden’s stark condemnation comes as Covid-19 vaccine uptake is plateauing in the US and new cases are once more on the rise.

Anne-Marie debuts her new album as a series of TikTok clips

Musicians have long debuted tracks as clips on TikTok ahead of their official release, but singer Anne-Marie has gone a step further and made her entire new album available for TikTokers to use.

Ahead of the album launch on Friday, clips of all the tracks from the album were released on TikTok.

This shows how TikTok’s partnerships with labels is evolving, to the point where dropping clips for fans to use a few days ahead of release is becoming an increasingly common marketing tactic.

Also In The News

1. 110 brands, including Mars, KFC and GSK, have signed an open letter condemning Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat’s “lack of adequate action” in response to the racist abuse suffered by members of the England football team.

2. Good-Loop has launched an ad tracker, Green Ad Tag, to monitor the carbon cost of digital campaigns, detecting data transmission in real-time with a number of variations.

3. Netflix’s loss of domestic subscribers has prompted the streaming giant to focus on other ways of increasing user interaction, including a video game expansion riding off the success of its interactive show Black Mirror Bandersnatch and Stranger Things game. 

4. Ampersand is looking to expand its operations in partnership with LiveRamp. The partnership aims to ‘democratise’ the way TV is planned and will allow marketers to create custom audiences. 

5. The UK’s (embarrassingly slow) broadband speed could become 400 times faster with the next generation of broadband pioneered by BT-owned Openreach and Nokia. 

6. West Ham fans have taken to Twitter to rejoice in the rumoured signing of Italian national team member Domenico Berardi to the football club, which would bring a much-needed quality and experienced forward to the team. 

Worth A Read

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Under The Radar – 23 July

Heather Barnes on Unsplash

This week, we discuss:

1. Wolf-whistling to be criminalised

2. Ben & Jerry’s

3. The Alienation Game

Wolf-whistling to be criminalised

What happened?

Street harassment like wolf-whistling and the targeting of women in a sexually graphic or lewd way could become a crime under new government plans to protect the female population.

What does it mean?

Priti Patel’s pledge to make the public harassment of women and girls a criminal offence is a move in the right direction. However, the execution and follow-through is a far more salient issue and relies on institutions such as universities, schools, industry and law enforcement to make meaningful change, which is no easy feat.

It’s also questionable whether the legislation goes far enough. The new measures disregard that sexual harassment is not only isolated to male on female violence, and an urgent reconfiguration to include all sexual harassment victims – from male to trans – is needed.

But no matter how comprehensive the law is, powerful institutions that are often guilty of silencing accusations of harassment must be overhauled to create a society where victims believe their claims will be taken seriously and appropriately dealt with.

For example, despite being hotspots for sexual harassment and violence, a third of universities use ‘gagging’ clauses and NDAs to prevent students from speaking out about sexual assault on campuses. Meanwhile, recent accusations made by charity campaigners that police forces are often happy for rape and harassment victims to withdraw their cases as it lightens their burden only underlines how those with the power to enforce the new laws cannot be trusted to do so.

The material impact of such measures is yet to be seen, but without institutional change, this legislation will do little to combat sexual harassment and restore a real feeling of safety on the streets.

Ben & Jerry’s

What happened?

Ben & Jerry’s has announced that it will no longer sell its ice cream in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The US company said that sales in the territories were “inconsistent with our values”.

What does it mean?

With Ben & Jerry’s long being known for its strongly-held political values, its decision to end ice cream sales in Israeli settlements is not out of character. But in recent years, as part of a growing trend, a chorus of other companies have also caught on to the merits of espousing clear stances on the biggest political and social issues of our time.

Within certain circles, this phenomenon has become known as ‘Woke Capitalism’, which was described by Helen Lewis in an article for The Atlantic last year as brands gravitating “toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival.”

No doubt then that the boundaries between business and politics have never been more blurred, with no end in sight for a process that appears to be a long way from meeting its nadir.

Though if, and when, such a nadir does transpire, it will not be difficult to understand why: the company still sells its ice cream in China, which continues to hold roughly one million Uighurs in forced labour camps.

Seemingly though, running forced labour camps is not a practice Ben & Jerry’s considers to be inconsistent with their values.

The Alienation Game

What happened?

This week, Channel 4 aired an episode of its investigative programme Dispatches, which offered a rare insight into the UK’s family court system.

An Act of Parliament dictates that what happens in family courts must be kept secret, but the programme pushed the limits of this mandate to show how family courts are failing victims of domestic abuse.

What does it mean?

The episode revealed the alarmingly common practice of children being forcibly removed from one of their parents on charges of “parental alienation.”

The term was first coined by the American child psychiatrist Richard Gardner, who claimed that one parent can brainwash a child to distance it from the other parent. Gardner is a controversial figure, who has claimed that 90 percent of mothers are liars and that paedophilia is a “widespread and accepted practice”. His “science” has been discredited, with the US Supreme Court ruling that the term is based on “soft sciences” and therefore inadmissible in court; here in the UK, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence does not recognise parental alienation as a legitimate clinical term.

And yet, in family courts, it is gaining traction. The episode highlighted painful cases in which the charge is brought against mothers who are trying to protect their children from an abusive father. These women are told that they cannot “alienate” the children from the perpetrator and that they must even actively promote contact between them or else risk the children being moved away.

Family courts have long been shrouded in mystery. By lifting the lid on this concerning phenomenon, Channel 4’s episode will hopefully put pressure on the Government to reform the system.

This Week’s Must Reads

1. The Republicans Have Already Given Biden What He Needs by Russel Berman for The Atlantic

2. Obscured by bias and opinion the news no longer feels like the news by Ben Cobley for the Critic

3. Bitcoin’s gold rush was always an illusion by Will Dunn for the New Statesman

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Under The Radar – 16 July

Parker Coffman on Unsplash

This week, we discuss:

1. Strife within the Green Party

2. The controversies surrounding the Online Safety Bill

3. The new threats to national security

Strife within the Green Party

What happened?

This week former London Mayoral candidate Sian Berry quit as co-leader of the Green Party, citing a dispute within the party over trans rights. Her resignation follows that of her other co-leader, Jonathan Bartley, who announced he was stepping down earlier this month.

What does it mean?

The Greens have made steady electoral progress in recent years. The party had a record showing in the local elections earlier this May, making a net gain of 91 council seats to take its national total to a record 444. Their success means the party now has a role in running 18 councils, providing it with the opportunity to demonstrate its embryonic governing credentials.

Yet, in spite of their recent electoral successes, they have now become embroiled in the increasingly heated debate on trans rights in the UK. This dispute isn’t exclusive to them either, with Labour frequently finding itself dogged by internal strife between its trans and women’s rights activists.

The Green Party was principally founded to promote, and advance, environmentalism as a new mainstream ideological tenet of British politics. Labour’s eternal identity crisis, coupled with the growing salience of environmentalism across the political spectrum, suggests that they have never been dealt a better hand by which to access the levers of power in the UK.

Regardless of the Greens’ ripe potential for greater electoral success, whether they will rise to the occasion remains to be seen. At present, they appear more concerned with sacrificing their political ambitions on the altar of internal divisions and progressive ideological purity.

Seemingly not so dissimilar to Labour after all.

Online Safety Bill: Nicola Roberts Calls The Shots  

What happened?

Girls Aloud star Nicola Roberts criticised the government’s Online Safety Bill, arguing that it will fail to stop abusive users from re-joining social media platforms after being banned.

A victim of online harassment herself, the singer had been asked to champion the bill.

What does it mean?

The Online Safety Bill, which was two years in the making, put forward a number of proposals, including giving Ofcom the power to fine social media platforms up to 10% of their annual global turnover if they fail to protect their users from harmful content.

This aspect of the Bill has received extra attention in the past week with fall-out from the Euro 2020 final bringing the whole nation’s attention to the problem of online trolls. Since Sunday, there has been widespread uproar over tech companies’ lack of ability – or desire – to clamp down on racist and threatening posts against Rashford, Saka and Sancho.

Many have been pushing the Government to go further and make social media platforms require users to sign in with formal identification. Such a measure would address the problem that Roberts raised as abusers would no longer be able to hide behind new accounts under different names.

But online identification raises too many new problems to be the solution to all ills that people hope it will be. To name just a few: it will severely limit the freedom of people with marginalised identities to form safe communities online in which they can express themselves; it will discourage whistleblowers from reporting concerns without fear of retaliation; it will give tech companies even more power to collect data on citizens.

Bringing some semblance of order to the Wild West of the Internet is no enviable task but it’s imperative that the Government consider all likely consequences before the Online Safety Bill becomes law.

Threats old and new  

What happened?

MI5 Director General Ken McCallum provided an annual threat update on Wednesday and the organisation’s drive to learn, adapt, and strengthen the UK’s security. He also reflected on the withdrawal of UK troops from Afghanistan and the ongoing challenge of encryption.

What does it mean?

Since 2001, tackling terrorism abroad and preventing attacks at home has been the cornerstone of the UK’s national security strategy.

But MI5 is increasingly shifting focus to counter-intelligence operations from hostile states, warning the public to be vigilant.

Foreign states like Russian are not limiting themselves to attacks on former comrades like Sergei Skripal, but are sowing discord amongst the British public, corrupting public officials, and launching damaging cyber-attacks. China and Iran are similarly engaging in hostile activity, with MI5 reporting 10,000 cases of normal people being targeted by foreign agents.

But that’s not to say that the threat from terrorism has diminished. The withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan means the country is ripe for terrorist organisations to set up camps to train militants. Equally ISIS, although a shadow of the threat it once posed, is still trying to attack the UK and radicalise young people using slick online propaganda.

Tragically, there’s also the threat from within. As the country continues to grapple with the racism that plagued the England team’s heroic loss to Italy, there is growing concern that teenagers are being lured towards far-right extremism on the internet, as racism fuels a growing threat to security.

This Week’s Must Reads

1. ‘ESG investing: funds weigh sovereign debt profits against human rights’ by Laurence Fletcher and Tommy Stubbington for the Financial Times

2. ‘No cults, no politics, no ghouls: how China censors the video game world’ by Oliver Holmes for The Guardian

3. ‘Let’s talk about our addiction to cheap money’ by James Kirkup for The Times

4. ‘Net-zero transport dream demands an infrastructure revolution’ by Alan Tovey for The Telegraph

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