British Government Plans For YouTube
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/plans-for-prominence-of-trusted-news-sources-on-social-media-alongside-measures-to-reform-public-service-media-in-the-uk
The British government have sent out a green paper and a consultation on ensuring “trusted” news sources have priority on Brits home page on YouTube. This is likely to have the likes of the BBC, ITV, etc appearing on home pages and smaller media outlets such as TLDR who do a fantastic job pushed off. It is thought this has come about because the big British media companies and corporations are complaining they don’t get enough space on home pages. Smaller channels already successful on the platform will be forced to close. YouTube has problems with fake and bad news but is this the answer?
The British government have sent out a green paper and a consultation on ensuring “trusted” news sources have priority on Brits home page on YouTube. This is likely to have the likes of the BBC, ITV, etc appearing on home pages and smaller media outlets such as TLDR who do a fantastic job pushed off. It is thought this has come about because the big British media companies and corporations are complaining they don’t get enough space on home pages. Smaller channels already successful on the platform will be forced to close. YouTube has problems with fake and bad news but is this the answer?
Comments
While I have no reason to think this foundation is involved in anything but good things, that is certainly not a name I would choose if I was trying to avoid provoking ironic mockery.
So for the analogy to old-school media...
The government makes a list of newspaper and magazines regarded as credible, and mandates that those papers be displayed in the windows of all news-shops, and for the rest you have to go inside and ask.
IOW, for all practical purposes, the government is compelling vendors to give preferential advertising to certain media properties, at least some of which are owned by private concerns and operated for a profit.
(And, yeah. I know the internet is considered a commons, and hence more legally susceptible to regulation than publishers selling stuff printed on paper and requiring targeted distribution. But the basic idea behind both forms of regulation seems to me the same.)
I would imagine that smaller channels would prop themselves up financially via Patreon, paid Substack subscriptions etc as many smaller channels currently do.
Several of the ones I watch do this already, but are also asking people to click on all notices and click the bell or they are likely to disappear from people’s feeds.
This already happens with smaller non-news channels - it doesn't need government interference to happen, sadly.
Well, isn't there a principle in the law that the airwaves are public property, and hence eg. you can print the word "fuck" in a novel, but you can't say it on the radio without incurring a fine?
To put it in specifcally British terms, there's nothing equivalent to Ofcom for print media. I assume the internet is closer to radio and TV in this regard.
That's a political choice rather than a legal principle. Successive governments have run scared of regulating the billionaire-owned press for fear that it will turn on them. Plus, at present, Ofcom is largely a paper tiger - it shows little interest in regulating GB News, for example.
Well, I think I can can say with some assurance that in Canada, the print media, billionaire-owned or otherwise, is not subject to anywhere near the same sorta regulation that airwave-based media is. My campus paper back in the day once published an explicitly illustrated hardcore-porn parody of Star Trek, with no legal blowback. Had such imagery been shown on television, I'm pretty sure any complaining viewer could have gotten it automatically referred to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission(*).
Which is not say that print media is a free-for-all, but I think stuff like problematic pornography would be pursued through the criminal courts, not a regulatory body, and the reasoning I've always heard for this distinction is that one form of media is print and the other is airwaves.
(*) Established in 1968 as the Canadian Radio-Television Commission, names which would seem to indicate precisely which forms of media the government wanted to regulate. Maybe fear of the print-media billionaires had something to do with it, but I think it's also reasonable to assume that the more private nature of print media was a big reason for its exclusion as well.
You're welcome.
Maybe "commons" was the wrong word. I meant media that's delivered via infrastructure that's regarded as public rather than private property.
In the case of the internet (from wikipedia): Anyone can create internet infrastructure, as long as it complies with the standards.
In contrast, in the UK, the electromagnetic spectrum is managed by Ofcom (the statutory regulator of communications) which issues licences authorising its use.
One way of looking at the internet is as a novel system which enables both the publication and the distribution of anything and everything digital. And for interesting historical reasons, it isn't owned by anyone. (But then neither is the system by which people can publish and distribute handmade fanzines. The stark difference is in the way the technologies scale.)
There's a lot more to the internet than social media, but it is currently social media that dominates people's attentive (or not so attentive) engagement, largely as a result of deliberate design by social media companies.
And although the decision to make Ofcom responsible for "online safety" was political (as already noted), I think it's plausible that social media is "consumed" in a way that more closely resembles established broadcast media. It's not that the internet was conceived as a broadcast medium, but it's the aspect that currently gets the most political attention and generates the most headlines. (Bearing in mind that there are a number of deeply vested interests involved.)
That aside, the thing about new technologies and novel systems is that no-one really knows how to manage them. Maybe regulating social media as a broadcast medium will improve matters, or maybe there are a few more iterations to go before societies land on something we can live with.