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- Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020
Journal of Digital Media & Policy - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020
Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Opening the gates: Plurality regulation and the public interest
Authors: Justin Schlosberg and Des FreedmanThis article sets out the emergent challenges and opportunities for developing effective and ‘future proof’ policy for regulating media plurality. This analysis is carried out against the backdrop of UK authorities’ 2018 public interest test of the proposed merger between 21st Century Fox and Sky, and the latest data on the UK media ownership landscape. That merger review established important precedents for plurality reform, particularly in its acknowledgement that digital intermediaries are not an inherently pluralizing force and that regulatory intervention is needed to prevent concentrations of agenda power, especially at the level of wholesale newsgathering. The article goes on to critically examine the existing regulatory approach to considerations of whether media mergers are in the public interest, especially in the light of mounting evidence of intensifying consolidation within and across news platforms. This article argues that effective plurality reform must start with new legislation that sets out indicative thresholds and detailed guidance on the meaning of plurality sufficiency. This will enable a proper assessment of plurality outside merger activity and could serve as the basis for periodic reviews, enabling regulators to respond effectively to the challenge of new technologies and dynamic market conditions. We also address problems in the plurality measurement framework developed by Ofcom, namely, the inclusion of digital intermediaries as news ‘sources’ in data collection and analysis. In light of findings from the Fox/Sky merger review, a more effective approach would be to reallocate consumption attributed to major intermediaries based on analysis of the actual news sources consumed via those platforms. Far from privileging intermediaries, this approach will provide a more robust basis on which to bring them into the fold of plurality regulation, namely, through the development of plurality standards for algorithm governance. Such an approach also reflects a new reality in which the interplay of gatekeeping and agenda power between traditional media and intermediaries is not a zero-sum game, amidst growing evidence that major intermediaries are serving to consolidate rather than diversify the news offer in favour of incumbent and mostly legacy publishers.
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Finland: Media welfare state in the digital era?
More LessThe concept of media welfare state is a combination of the democratic corporatist media system and social democratic welfare state model, describing the distinctiveness of the Nordic countries and their media systems with four basic principles. Media welfare state is based on communication services understood as public goods, freedom from editorial interference, cultural policy and economic support for media pluralism as well as preference for consensual solutions involving cooperation between main stakeholders. However, identifying a joint media welfare state model in recent media and communication policy decisions made in Nordic countries on developing communication infrastructures, media delivery and universal access turns out to be difficult. During the last three decades, none of the four largest Nordic countries has strictly followed all the four principles. In most cases, Finland has ended up with different solutions than its Nordic neighbours and sometimes also in contradiction with the Media Welfare State model. There is evidence that the Nordic media markets have been losing their distinguishability over the years. But the main reason why the present-day Nordic countries do not fit into media welfare state model is that they no longer are welfare states – not at least in the same fashion as they used to be. In Finland, this transition from the welfare state to the competition state has been more rapid and extensive than elsewhere in the Nordic region, partly because of its geopolitical position. The Finnish economy has also been exceptionally dependent on a single mobile technology corporation.
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Aggressive joint compression for DTV simulcast
By Daniel SotoA complete simulcast on digital TV (DTV) can be complex to implement in some scenarios, such as when the network bandwidth has many limitations. A common solution in such scenarios is to limit the number of duplicate programmes in the simulcast to a minimum. However, this practice slows down the migration to a new generation. This article analyses the causes of this delay and proposes a technique to improve the efficiency of the simulcast. Focusing on the migration from MPEG-2 SD to H.264 HD broadcasts in DVB-T networks, the article presents an efficient solution that can accelerate the transition period.
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Impacts of digital literacy and ecosystem on continuance intention to consume digital video: Study from four countries in Southeast Asia
Authors: Hendy Kasim, Edi Abdurachman, Asnan Furinto and Wibowo KosasihContinuance intention to use a product or service is essential for digital video platforms to have a sustainable business. Apart from the video itself, continuous use of the service is heavily influenced by the consumers’ experiences of the service. Digital literacy is one of the key components in use of any digital service, as well as the digital ecosystem itself. This research finds that users’ digital experiences are heavily impacting the continuance intention to use a digital video service. However, the impacts from digital literacy and digital ecosystem, while significant, are not very dominant in shaping the user’s experience.
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How users tweet about a cyber attack: An explorative study using machine learning and social network analysis
Authors: Daniel Vogler and Florian MeissnerCybercrime is a growing threat for firms and customers that emerged with the digitization of business. However, research shows that even though people claim that they are concerned about their privacy online, they do not act correspondingly. This study investigates how prevalent security issues are during a cyber attack among Twitter users. The case under examination is the security breach at the US ticket sales company, Ticketfly, that compromised the information of 26 million users. Tweets related to cybersecurity are detected through the application of automated text classification based on supervised machine learning with support vector machines. Subsequently, the users that wrote security-related tweets are grouped into communities through a social network analysis. The results of this multi-method study show that users concerned about security issues are mostly part of expert communities with already superior knowledge about cybersecurity.
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- Report
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Microfake: How small-scale deepfakes can undermine society
By Tom AscottAdvances in deepfake technology have led to the emergence of a new picture of how doctored material will be used in disinformation campaigns. While safeguards ensure that manipulated videos may not be such a problem at the highest levels of security and defence, lower levels – such as local elections – remain vulnerable to malign actors. At such levels, deepfakes can be distributed using social media channels to target unsuspecting victims. Current solutions only protect individuals who are prominent enough to be covered by the mainstream media, and not enough is being done by governments or social media companies to protect ordinary users from coordinated inauthentic activity online. However, with more images and videos of ourselves online than ever before, anyone can be a victim of a disinformation campaign. As deepfakes become easier to make, no one is safe – hyper-localized manipulation will create problems for democratic institutions that have not yet been fully understood.
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- Book Reviews
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Understanding Media Production, Paul Dwyer (2019)
By Max SextonReview of: Understanding Media Production, Paul Dwyer (2019)
London and New York: Routledge, 232 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-13823-814-5, h/bk, USD 124
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Audiovisual Industries and Diversity: Economics and Policies in the Digital Era, Luis A. Albornoz and María Trinidad García Leiva (eds) (2019)
More LessReview of: Audiovisual Industries and Diversity: Economics and Policies in the Digital Era, Luis A. Albornoz and María Trinidad García Leiva (eds) (2019)
New York: Routledge, 210 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-13838-445-3, h/bk, USD 124
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