SOCIAL MEDIA MPs consider law to make Facebook etc liable in abuse cases

Again, newspaper owners are campaigning for the likes of Facebook (which profits from their content while passing back minimal revenue; is sucking vital ad revenue away from them; changes their newsfeed algorithms periodically, often losing newspapers large proportions of online readers as a result with no means for them to protest or influence this)
Guardian: Make Facebook liable for content, says report on UK election intimidation.

Theresa May should consider the introduction of two new laws to deter the intimidation of MPs during elections and force social media firms to monitor illegal content, an influential committee has said.

The independent Committee on Standards in Public Life, which advises the prime minister on ethics, has called for the introduction within a year of a new specific offence in electoral law to halt widespread abuse when voters go to the polls.
The watchdog will recommend another law to shift the liability for illegal content on to social media firms such as Facebook and Google, a legal change which will be easier once Britain leaves the European Union.
Both changes form part of the hard-hitting conclusions of an inquiry into intimidation experienced by parliamentary candidates in this year’s election campaign.
Other recommendations include:

• Social media firms should make decisions quickly to take down intimidatory content.

• Political parties should, by December 2018, draw up a joint code of conduct on intimidatory behaviour during election campaigns.
  
• The National Police Chiefs’ Council should ensure that police are trained to investigate offences committed through social media.
  
• Ministers should bring forward rules so that council candidates will no longer be required to release their home addresses.

FUTURE WEB 2.0 Facebook Google to be declared publishers?

The newspaper industry have been campaigning for this for some time - but I wouldn't hold your breath; Facebook alone has 1 of the biggest lobbying teams/spend of any global corporation (and boosted it significantly as soon as the Capita/election influence scandal hit hard in March/April 2018).

Guardian: Ofcom chair raises prospect of regulation for Google and Facebook.

UPDATE: The Culture Minister - in the same week he fiercely opposed Leveson2 and tougher press regulation (but actually seems to have proposed statutory regulation by the back door...), he's announced plans for new legislation to regulate social media, including a levy to pay for more monitoring.

UK government plans new legislation to tame internet's 'wild west'

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/19/uk-government-plans-new-laws-tackle-internet-wild-west?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

Websites UGC replacing press political influence?

This Guardian article looks at the rise of alternative news media during the 2017 UK general election, and the arguable decline of press influence. I'd be cautious over that conclusion though - the broadcast media still tend to take the day's news agenda from each morning's newspapers.
DIY political websites: new force shaping the general election debate. (sample below)

Press power in EU referendum, history of Mail might

Great article that provides some historical context for the current, overwhelming right-wing bias of the UK press, which seemingly proved decisive in the 2016 Brexit vote. Here's a short sample - spot the Curran and Seaton book title in there ...:

There’s another consistent and important thread in the Mail’s long political story too. The Mail is a newspaper that wants power. The Mail is a player not an observer, today as in the past. It was the campaign against Stanley Baldwin’s leadership of the Tory party by Lord Rothermere’s Mail and Lord Beaverbrook’s Express in 1931 that triggered Baldwin’s famous onslaught about the proprietors aiming at power – “and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”. These are words that could echo through the Mail’s coverage of the EU debate without a single change, as do Baldwin’s less often quoted comments that the press were “engines of propaganda” whose methods were “falsehood, misrepresentation, half-truths [and] … suppression”. 

I looked up Baldwin’s great speech this week when the Mail, unlike almost every other newspaper, put nothing whatever about the Orlando gay club massacre on its front page on Monday. By any standards this brutal attack was the main story of the day. Every other newspaper led with it. Meanwhile what was the Mail’s front-page headline? It was “Fury over plot to let 1.5m Turks in Britain”. The Orlando story wasn’t on pages two or three either. These were political priorities, not journalistic ones.

Just as with film, we need to be careful in assuming influence from a biased press - media effects is a tricky area! This is, to be fair, less contentious: when the bulk of the UK public have been exposed to decades of hyperbole and frequently made-up anti-EU stories, Euroscepticism is hardly surprising. Its that long-term impact of bias that is crucial, just as its the months and years of anti-Labour/left-wing coverage that makes it hard for the likes of Jeremy Corbyn to prosper - NOT the final editorials.

The EU referendum is a battle of the press versus democracy.

Press bias is reflected in readers voting ... except Indie

Some useful, clear evidence of the bias of the UK national newspapers, though linking this to impact on their readers isn't quite so simple, even if the data suggests this is strong. Research looked at how the readers of different papers voted, and the link to that paper's editorial line (made explicit in 2015 for the general election, with each paper writing an editorial on how they thought readers should vote), with the left-leaning Guardian having a majority of Labour voting readers, the opposite of the right-wing papers with majority Tory voters.

The Indie advised its readers to vote for the right-wing Tory/Lib Dem coalition, but its mainly left-wing readership unsurprisingly voted Labour.

See article.

FUTURE Tory government media policy will be...

A QUICK LOOK AT PROSPECTS FOR MEDIA REGULATION UNDER NEW TORY GOVERNMENT

IN A NUTSHELL:

At this point, nothing is certain, but informed speculation is part of the remit ... 

Some major changes in (de)regulation of (concentration of) ownership + PSB requirements, with the BBC facing major upheaval and deeper top-slicing, possibly even groundwork for eventual privatisation. Channel 4 could be sold off, and restrictions lifted on cross-media ownership. The press, most of which campaigned for this government, will be largely untouched. Alongside economic liberalism (further free market deregulation) will come social conservatism, with moves to impose age ratings on music videos, restrict online freedom of speech and access to adult sites, and give the security forces the right to eavesdrop on all electronic communications, spanning social media, email, phone conversations and browsing history. OfCom to take on BBC regulation?

The fate of the BBC (see Guardian news feed) is likely to be the big media news story

A MORE DETAILED ANALYSIS:

2015 General Election: Media Policy

Rather than post a stack of posts reacting to policy announcements and eventual manifesto pledges, I'll gather links and points in this post.

Key (probable) issues:

• Future of BBC, funding, downsizing?; form of BBC regulation (scrap Trust?)
• Wider future of PSB requirements
• Future/role of OfCom
• Watershed in digital era
• Extending ratings system to music video and other media content
• Press regulation, Leveson response, IPSO
• Privacy laws, protection of journalists' right to privacy
• Film industry state funding
• Pluralism, (concentration of) ownership, cross-media ownership limits

UPDATE, 21ST APRIL: GUARDIAN GUIDE TO MEDIA POLICY PLEDGES
I've been saving a variety of links, but the Media Guardian has come to my rescue on this one!
Here's their helpfully pithy overview (written by Jasper Jackson):

Plans for the media industry may not be seen as a big vote winner this election, but the manifestos published over the past few days suggest that each party has a very different take on the industry.

Sunifesto Murdoch right-wing vision made explicit

Wee bit careless to present so few ethnic minority faces?

I can't recall seeing quite so detailed, especially from a tabloid, as this before - an all-encompassing manifesto that quite neatly provides the clearest possible evidence of The Sun and thus Murdoch's (as much as he absurdly continues to deny influencing his papers' viewpoints and agenda!) ideological orientation.

The timing is smart - the political parties are yet to publish their manifestoes, and UKIP, Labour, Lib Dems and Tories (the major right-wing/centre-right parties) will all feel some pressure to adhere to some of this classic neo-liberal agenda.

Roy Greenslade has been discussing Murdoch's recent, rather surprising, use of Twitter to make public his previously 'private' (they were clear enough if you read his papers!) views and partisanship:

For Murdoch’s inner circle, such open political expression is a thing of wonder. Before the age of social media, he kept himself firmly in the background, careful not to expose his own public views while actively seeking to sway elections through the editorial endorsements in his many newspapers across the globe.“He made clear to his editors which politicians deserved support and those that didn’t,” said a former News Corporation executive. “But unless it was time for an endorsement, those conversations remained private.”The former executive added: “Now with his Twitter feed, the world can see how he is thinking all the time. Which is unusual for Rupert, who liked to keep his own counsel. It has surprised many of us to see him go so public.”

Its worth reading his article in full. A bit more:

Murdoch watchers see the dual-track emoting of his Twitter feed and the editorial pages of his newspapers as symbiotic. The social media site does not only provide the media magnate a direct channel to vent his opinions – it also acts as a prompt for Murdoch’s editors, they say.
David Folkenflik, who is NPR’s media correspondent and the author of Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires, said that “Twitter has changed the ball-game. Every Murdoch editor around the world will be monitoring that feed very closely – they check it repeatedly – to see whether he’s expressed himself again.”
As the power of newspapers has waned amid the fragmentation of digital discourse, the relationship between Murdoch and his newspapers has arguably turned upside-down. Before the proliferation of other news sites, he used his newspapers to amplify his personal political views; today, with the News Corp empire bigger than ever, he uses his personal Twitter feed to amplify the influence of his newspapers.
As the former News Corp executive put it: “As newspaper endorsements become less and less important, this is one way for him to maintain a high political profile.”
That trend remains visible in the UK, where Murdoch pushed the power of newspaper endorsements to the limit with the Sun’s famous 1992 front page on the day after the Conservative party’s general election victory: “It’s the Sun Wot Won It”. Today, the Sun has to work that much harder to have the same impact – this week it launched the endorsement process for the UK’s May general election, 100 days before the event. It dubbed the paper’s campaign the “Sunifesto” and flagged it as “100 days to save Britain”.

THE SUNIFESTO: ANALYSIS

As to that 'Sunifesto', there are a few especially interesting points to consider:

Government regulate blogs 4 election...but not press?!

Can the electoral commission be serious about political blogs? http://gu.com/p/44zg2

Roy Greenslade reports on the Electoral Commission effectively bringing in backdoor (statutory; it is a government office) regulation of one part of the press: political blogs:

I don’t think we should overlook the revelation by Guido Fawkes that the Electoral Commission believes political blogs may need to register as “non-party campaigners” ahead of the general election.How bizarre. Guido’s alter ego, Paul Staines, was right to have rejected the “Putinesque” plan, as should other blogs contacted by the commission, such as ConservativeHome, LabourList and LibDemVoice.This is so last century, a heavy-handed and nonsensical response to the flowering of political debate in the digital world. Given that newspapers and magazines are exempt from such treatment, it is also unfair.

He continued: