Reply to post: Re: It's the easy way out...

Re: It's the easy way out...

Well, no.

The problems are many, but the main one is that this kind of spread of misinformation falls between the cracks of traditional legislation. The SNS (social networking) companies aren't counted as traditional media, so no count is made of the amount of pound-euro-dollars that are spent on it during political campaigning. That means less accountability and less transparency in what is supposed to be a free vote. We presumably still have those.

The other, related, problem of this "social media as God" (of the gaps) situation is that if we want to regulate it, we quite reasonably want to do so in a way that causes the least amount of harm to the existing body of jurisprudence. That's what the proposal is mainly about: we don't want "proper" reporters (like on this site) to fall foul of new laws, but we do want to clean up the "wild west" situation where actors hide behind a flag of convenience (like "aggregator", "conduit", "advertising agency", "charity", etc.) that shield them from accountability when it comes to spreading political messages for profit and for their own vested interest.

Obviously, drawing a distinction between "proper" journalism and these "bad actors" isn't easy, especially given that much of the legitimate media is increasingly consumed online. Maybe this third class of "media organ" isn't strictly necessary. Maybe we just have to look into tightening up controls on how political funding is reported, which agencies can receive charity status, or improve across-the-board transparency of ownership and funding structures (and not just for political campaigning, though this is an overarching problem that is much more difficult to solve).

On the whole, though, I applaud the thinking of the report. It shouldn't be too hard for legitimate interests to engage in public conversation to explain why they shouldn't be tarred with the same brush as the kinds of bad actors that we know are out there. I think that they would be pushing against an open door with this particular committee/working group, and their public would no doubt also be receptive to arriving at some sort of workable solution.