NUDITY FACEBOOK wethenipple protest over double standards

FOLLOW-UP RESOURCES: 

2020 MARCH: LIZZO ATTACKS TIKTOK FOR RACIST, BODY SHAMING CENSORSHIP (Guardian)

2020 OCTOBER INSTA ACCUSED OF CENSORING ONLY PLUS-SIZED WOMEN'S BODIES (Guardian)

While IPSO has an Editor's Code (though it had nothing to say about Page 3 & it's discrimination clause certainly doesn't impact sexist coverage) the web is a largely unregulated media (the so-called wild wild web).

Facebook, like Google (especially YouTube) and others to a lesser degree, is under fire from governments and pressure groups for its undermining of democracy and general lack of openness. Unlike the BBFC and IPSO these FAANGS giants (& smaller co's) keep their algorithms and rule books as closely guarded secrets, their information firewall occasionally breached by whistleblowers or research.

STORY: Guardian, JUNE 2019: Naked protesters condemn nipple censorship at Facebook headquarters.

The different treatment given to the male and female nipple is one case where the social media giants' policies are known. All are censorious of the female nipple, operating a stark double standard with the male nipple, though the effectiveness of this varies - Instagram and Facebook run algorithms to remove such images (including many cases, controversially, of breast feeding), while the likes of YouTube run ineffective age 'blocks'.

This has sparked multiple campaigns I've blogged on before, notably freethenipple. #wethenipple is another, enacting a smartly designed naked protest outside Facebook US offices - covering their nakedness with cutouts of male nipples.

The issue, as I've pointed out before, is complex. The gender binary is well established in law - women can be prosecuted for 'indecent exposure' for baring their nipples, men can't. Media coverage continues to normativize the sexualisation of the female nipple.

Such law (and media policies) is oblivious to the contemporary undermining of the gender binary through increasing visibility and prominence of queered identities, leading to an increase in gender-free toilets. Butler would approve - while some US states have passed laws (sparking cultural boycotts) banning trans people from using bathrooms of their asserted gender.

What isn't so ambiguous is the problematic nature of giants like Facebook, increasingly influential in shaping opinion and cultural views, having secretive unregulated rules on what they deem acceptable or unacceptable.

As weak, largely ineffective and lamentably limited (ownership? lack of pluralism?) as the Editor's Code is, it is at least transparent, with decisions explained (though no ruling is made if mediated) on their website, as are the BBFC's (in their case backed by regular research into public attitudes on swearing etc).

What isn't

YouTube rank pranks endangering children?

Who should regulate this - OfCom (YouTube channel equivalent to TV channel?), BBFC (video - after all, they partially regulate music video on YouTube)? The social media giants are getting a really easy ride compared to the tightly regulated TV and (to a lesser degree; no ownership restrictions) film industries, both of which are subject to strict licensing systems. Surely they ARE now competitors to both, so perhaps the tough regulation on film/TV is unfair - unless also applied to UGC and social media?

Mean stream: when YouTube pranks go horribly wrong.

Pranks have been a booming part of YouTube’s scene for years – but it’s a subculture prone to attracting controversy. The latest incident has led to a US father and a stepmother losing custody of two of their children as a result of some of their prank videos.Mike Martin of Baltimore ran a channel named DaddyOFive, featuring his wife, Heather, and their five children. At the height of the controversy, but before his videos were made private, DaddyOFive had more than 750,000 subscribers and the clips were viewed more than 176m times.Family YouTube channels are not uncommon – but the Martins were accused of child abuse because they regularly made their children the subject of their pranks.

MPs say social media must face fines as publishers

MPs are adding their voice to the slowly growing pressure for the social media giants to face regulation equivalent to the traditional media industries. With convergence (a newspaper is now as much a website, app, radio, TV as it is a print medium!), it seems hard to justify the social media firms escaping regulation - unless we adopt a laissez faire, ultra free market approach and scrap or radically reduce ALL media regulation (deregulate).

NB: The Home Affairs Committee is made of backbench MPs from all parties, NOT government ministers; its job is to scrutinise the work of government and to make recommendations in that policy area - just as the DCMS (Department of Culture, Media + Sport) has the Culture Select Committee scrutinising its work (they were very critical of the PCC while the government ignored or even praised it!).

Social media companies are putting profit before safety and should face fines of tens of millions of pounds for failing to remove extremist and hate crime material promptly from their websites, MPs have said.The largest and richest technology firms are “shamefully far” from taking action to tackle illegal and dangerous content, according to a report by the Commons home affairs committee.The inquiry, launched last year following the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right gunman, concludes that social media multinationals are more concerned with commercial risks than public protection. Swift action is taken to remove content found to infringe copyright rules, the MPs note, but a “laissez-faire” approach is adopted when it involves hateful or illegal content.Referring to Google’s failure to prevent paid advertising from reputable companies appearing next to YouTube videos posted by extremists, the committee’s report said: “One of the world’s largest companies has profited from hatred and has allowed itself to be a platform from which extremists have generated revenue.”In Germany, the report points out, the justice ministry has proposed imposing financial penalties of up to €50m on social media companies that are slow to remove illegal content. 

Social media firms must face heavy fines over extremist content – MPs.

WEB 2.0 Media giants faking online following

A bizarre but significant twist - with pressure to show a strong online footprint growing in relation to declining print and linear viewing figures, it seems falsely boosting the numbers may be a common strategy. (see yournewswire)

There is much dispute over how papers calculate online readership, and similar arguments over online viewing figures (with YouTube's changing policies seeing huge drops in published figures for many channels and uploads).

According to one source at least the mainstream corporate media have also engaged in using specialists to set up 100s of 1000s of fake social media accounts to create a false sense of engagement ... AND to campaign against their critics, something that Chomsky and Herrman's near 40 year-old classic, Necessary Illusions, with its radical propaganda model, would recognise as flak (one of the five filters they argue systematically removes counter-hegemonic content from mainstream media discourse, or at least undermines it).

ADVERTISER POWER YouTube censors demonetised videos

A notable outcry here, as it reinforces one of the fundamental lessons needed to grasp the complexities of media regulation: advertisers form a de facto, informal regulator. If they won't pay for space in your outlet, in most media industries that will lead to a revenue crisis.

Chomsky has advertiser power as one of the five filters in his propaganda model.

The row and resignation over the Daily Telegraph spiking critical stories about HSBC to protect its advertising account with the bank; the 1960s manoeuvres of The Times to get rid of its new working class readers when advertisers refused to pay any extra for these non-ABC1s; Murdoch closing NoTW only when multiple advertiser boycotts were announced, with more to follow after social media campaigns, which threatened to contaminate other News Corp outlets; the fate of the Daily Herald, a left-wing, union owned paper that was for a time the biggest selling in the world, but would ultimately collapse and reappear as Murdoch's right-wing S*n ...

Some of the trashy YouTube content undermined by YouTube withdrawing ads from 'unsuitable' videos may appear trivial, but the principles of freedom of speech and media diversity are always most easily undermined by picking soft targets to establish censorial practices that can then be arbitrarily widened.

YouTube and Facebook, together with their all-important advertisers, exist as largely unregulated behemoths, gaining an ever expanding role in the media landscape. Censorship, whether it comes down to algorithm 'tweaks' or demonetising videos matters as mainstream media's reliance on digital platforms, not least these two, grows.

With more and more low/micro-budget and back catalogue films going online, not least through YouTube, this can also be viewed as an alternative form of regulation to the formal BBFC system.

YouTube video makers protest as ads are stripped from 'inappropriate' content.

FAIR USAGE Google to fight takedowns as unfair cop

Huge, huge issue for both regulators and the media companies they regulate: what to do about new media platforms that often undermine established practices and laws, not least copyright law.

For a student seeking hits for their film or video work, or just getting a handle on the complex realities of the modern film or music industries, you need to know the arguments and battles that rage around YouTube and others' practices...

After a series of skirmishes with established media and others the company said it was “offering legal support to a handful of videos that we believe represent clear fair uses which have been subject to DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] takedowns”. 

Google’s move comes after privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation successfully defended Stephanie Lenz, a mother whose 29-second video of her son dancing to Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy had been removed from YouTube after Universal Music issued a DMCA notice ordering it to be taken down. 

“With approval of the video creators, we’ll keep the videos live on YouTube in the US, feature them in the YouTube Copyright Center as strong examples of fair use, and cover the cost of any copyright lawsuits brought against them,” Fred von Lohmann, Google’s copyright legal director, wrote on the Google blog.

Google offers legal support to some YouTube users in copyright battles.

Music Video regulation: collected articles

I'll use this post to draw together links on this topic - use the tag and you'll find earlier posts on this, and I will be separately blogging more on this. Its a useful case study as it brings to the fore so many issues:

• Globalisation: UK regulation only to (compulsorily; likes of VEVO are volunteering theirs) apply to videos produced in UK?
• Digitisation: with YouTube's weak controls as just one example, do we really think this block digital t(w)eens from accessing these videos?!
• Politics and moral panic: this is a convenient, socially conservative issue on which the government can win favour from the right-wing press, just as was the case with the 80s 'video nasty' campaign
• Gender: is there a risk of penalising and continuing to render taboo female sexuality? OR is this an important corrective to the pornification of culture?
• Children: you can't decouple this from the digitisation and gender issues above. Should we be concerned that government gets to influence what is released/accessible in popular culture? Could such powers once granted spread beyond the initial, explicit intent? Is there research into effects to back up the need for this regulation?

ARTICLES FOR FURTHER READING:

So much for 'wild wild web': US gov spies on big sites

If you use YouTube, Apple, Google, Facebook (and more) - can there many who doesn't use one of these? - be aware that the US secret services directly copy every bit of data they generate/receive.
So much for the 'wild, wild web', out of control, anarchic and above regulation.

The Guardian splashed on this and other stories in a major series of features on 7.6.13. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data, part of this series.

Challenging Chomsky: Galloway's win

While I broadly agree with the Chomskian propaganda model, it has been been attacked by many academics, often for being too simplistic (and underestimating the active power of the audience).
Here's an interesting example which you can use if you wish to add a counterview on Chomsky (its always a sign of a good academic - including an A/A* grade A-level student! - to show an ability to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of any theory or academic source)...
George Galloway won an astonishing by-election victory in Bradford last night - despite typically fierce, extremely negative press. An avowed left-winger, he proved too left-wing for Labour, now a centrist party at best (many would argue actually right-wing), and is even generally criticised in the two centre-left papers (Mirror and Guardian) which might be expected to be supportive (his ties to reactionary Islamist clerics may explain this).
In short, here's a radical voice which the media generally filter out, not least through 'flak' ... yet he still won this election, and by a long way. Read the section from this article below, and you'll see that there's an interesting argument here for the growing power and influence of YouTube over more traditional news media ... should it be regulated by OfCom to the same level TV is? (If you look ahead to one of your homework essays you'll see this is a useful case study...)

The majority of those pledging their support had a number of things in common. They were either a first time voter or a disaffected Labourite, and all wanted to congratulate him on his robust stance against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many said they used to watch him on Press TV, the English-language Iranian controlled channel – until it was taken off air by the government earlier this year.
More still had watched YouTube clips of Galloway ripping into his detractors, whether in front of the US senate in 2005 or in a classically adversarial interview with Sky News about Gaza. These, Galloway proudly refers to as his "greatest hits". Only a handful recognised him primarily from his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006, when he dressed in a red unitard and pretended to be Rula Lenska's pussycat.

...

Hate Mail - some satirical vids on Daily Mail

The paper that published the Jan Moir column on Gateley, not to mention the example we've studied of the schoolgirl whose thighs they helpfully featured in close-up, is nicknamed the 'Hate Mail' by some (generally left-leaning or liberal folk) for its editorial stance (views) on race, sexuality, gender etc. An extremely influential paper, the current and previous government pay close attention to what it says and strive to avoid receiving flak from it - a rather ridiculous stance for the supposedly left-wing Labour government, but more understandable from a right-wing Tory administration.
The following are just a few of the satirical vids you can find on YouTube on this paper, which once delighted in supporting the Nazis and the UK equivalent, Mosley's brownshirts. Whether you agree with the views it expresses or not, they are worth being aware of as an example of the narrow ideological range of our national press, but also for the paper's reputation as the "voice of middle England". As with any satirical text, boundaries are pushed; please be aware before choosing to watch these that some of the material is 'edgy'.

See also the blog http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/

It may be worth considering whether such vids at least attempt to perform a scrutinising duty that the PCC fails to...



This one pushes it as far as it goes, adding new subtitles to a drama about Hitler's final days; I won't embed it but you can watch it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIRbcIVKeXk&feature=related
Less contentiously, Bill Oddie delivers a swipe at the Mail, also a target for Irish nationalists.
Here we have a BBC show responding to a characteristic Mail attack on the BBC; their points on why the Mail, Murdoch press etc routinely attack the BBC (at the end of the sketch) are useful:

This is a rather safer option: footage from the Select Committee exploring the issue of privacy, with DMail editor Paul Dacre on the spot:

The level of taste here is questionable, but ultimately the comedian Russell Howard simply utilises actual stories from the Mail, providing one example of how it can create moral panics:

Remember the outcry over the Ross/Brand show? Here's how Russell Brand responded to the Mail's coverage (it features shots of historical pro-Nazi Mail articles):

Perhaps sharpest of all is this sketch from a BBc3 show:


One final point on this; the Mail is something of an easy target, but is an outstanding success in commercial and cultural terms - the owners may not be as powerful as Murdoch but the Mail has become a paper that politicians pay close attention to. It shares many traits with The S*n, and is emblematic of the largely right-wing nature of our national press. Remember though what Curran and Seaton were trying to flag up: for long periods Britain was dominated by a 'radical press' (generally left-wing), with the various steps which are conventionally proclaimed as having achieved press freedom actually, in their eyes, consciously creating the near-exclusive right-wing press we see today.