The news that UK printed newspapers are continuing to lose circulation comes as no surprise, extending – as it does – a trend that has been gathering pace for two decades after digital media began to cannibalise print sales. Read the rest of this entry »
The number of active users of Facebook (those people who have logged onto the site in the previous month) has reached a historic high of 2.45 billion. To put this in some context, approximately 32% of the global population now use the social media platform, and the trend line of participation is still going up. Read the rest of this entry »
Online misinformation works, or so it would seem. One of the more interesting statistics from the 2019 UK general election was that 88% of advertisements posted on social media by the Conservative Party pushed figures that had already been deemed misleading by the UK’s leading fact-checking organisation, Full Fact. And, of course, the Conservatives won the election by a comfortable margin. Read the rest of this entry »
No sooner had the ballots closed than Boris Johnson’s new government was advancing and accelerating its attack on public service broadcasting, threatening to decriminalise nonpayment of the licence fee, boycott the BBC’s flagship Today programme and review the remit of Channel 4. Read the rest of this entry »
On 29 November 2019, Australia’s attorneys-general agreed on proposed amendments to the provisions which underpin Australian defamation laws. This means Australian governments have a plan for how to change defamation law. Read the rest of this entry »
At his Wednesday 20 November 2019 address to the National Press Club, Attorney-General Christian Porter said the federal government is pursuing “immediate” defamation law reform. The announcement seemed a bit odd, as defamation is a subject for state and territory governments to legislate on. A NSW-led law reform process has been ongoing for years. 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 »
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