“My big worry is that it may be too late to
slander laws and must be relevant, accurate and legally sound with what they produce. Your average tweeter isn’t. “It is an example of an uneven playing field, without doubt,” Ms James said. “We produced a white paper that we are now consulting on, and that will be the precursor to legislation that we plan to introduce next year to establish an independent, powerful regulator. “They will have the power to introduce codes of practice on all sorts of measures to do with internet harm. “They will be able to use those codes of practice to hold those companies to account for the security, wellbeing and care of their users.” There have been calls for Twitter and Facebook to be regulated in the same way as a newspaper, or website publisher, so that they are held accountable for anything published on their sites. A good idea in theory, but in practice with billions of posts worldwide to monitor each day, it’s never likely to be practical. “They have abused the privilege of their position and that is why they are now under such pressure – not just in Britain but other countries,” Ms James said. “Given the immense amount of content uploaded, it’s difficult to hold them to account for every item, but they have to demonstrate procedures they can enforce when content is discovered. “In Germany, companies face substantial fines if illegal hate speech is reported and not removed within 24hours and that system seems to be working well. “The environment is going to be very much more rigorous than it is at the moment.”
save newspapers” You know the reason why the word ‘gate’ is added on to anything to herald some kind of governmental crisis, don’t you?
If you didn’t hear of Watergate in the 1970s, then you must surely have seen the brilliant film All The President’s Men with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing BobWoodward and Carl Bernstein. Back in 1972, they held truth to power and brought down the then US President Richard Nixon. Ever since, any governmental crisis brought about by investigation has been suffixed with ‘gate’ How many Woodwards and Bernsteins operate in the modern era at a regional level, calling local governments to account is something Ms James is greatly concerned about. With the local press now dwindling at a worrying rate, there are precious few journalists able to give their time to investigate councils and governments, because too many are sourcing clickbait. “It’s absolutely true,” Ms James said.“A big part of local democracy accountability is through the local press, whatever form that takes. “Papers are having to let people go at a pace, they now have two or three people producing what was once done by 20 or more. “They don’t have time to investigate. Simple reporting of council meetings is fine, but it’s having that time to investigate is where accountability comes from.”
12 | July 2019 | www. punchline-gloucester .com
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