You don’t have to deny the growing political significance of social media to accept that the mainstream media continue to play a vital role in informing and priming public opinion during elections. Moreover, both worlds are deeply connected. Fewer people are buying newspapers but plenty are accessing the same content online. Read the rest of this entry »
Is the UK’s 2019 election a single-issue campaign centered on Brexit? Some newspapers clearly think so, with the Daily Mail and the Sun having already branded it the “Brexmas Election”. These declarations reflect a strong desire to see the Conservatives triumph and for Boris Johnson to enact his core promise to “Get Brexit Done”. Read the rest of this entry »
The Cambridge Analytica scandal of March 2018 changed the status of Facebook forever. The revelation that a political consultancy had illicitly gained access to the data of millions of Facebook users forced the company to change its approach to privacy, including its rules and algorithms. Read the rest of this entry »
The UK Labour Party is promising to provide free broadband internet to every British household by 2030 if it wins the 2019 election. To do this, the party would nationalise the broadband infrastructure business of BT and tax internet giants like Google and Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »
The idea that there’s no such thing as bad publicity could well be tested in the UK’s 2019 election campaign. So could the proposition that the only worse thing than people talking about you is people not talking about you, if our research into press coverage of the election is any indication. Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this week, in a written statement to the House of Commons, the UK’s Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the Rt Hon Nicky Morgan MP, announced the end of the UK’s controversial age-verification plans for online porn Read the rest of this entry »
The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, recently flew half-way across the world to meet Mark Zuckerberg. While the Bank of England is being rather coy about what was discussed, a number of recent speeches by the Governor have raised questions about Facebook’s move into crypto-currency with its plans for its Libra system. Read the rest of this entry »
The term “ghost protocol” might remind you of a famous blockbuster starring Tom Cruise, but here it applies to a new proposal by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the United Kingdom. Read the rest of this entry »
Children (and adults alike) seem to be ‘playing tag’ with a sophisticated and fast-changing digital environment whose privacy parameters are hard to define and consequences even harder to predict. Read the rest of this entry »
On 20 June 2019 the Information Commissioner’s Office published its Update Report into Adtech and Real Time Bidding [pdf] dealing with the use of personal data the real time bidding (“RTB”) process in online advertising. Read the rest of this entry »
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