Claims were made on Sunday that No 10may be preparing a new onslaught on the BBC with a threat to scrap the television licence fee and turn it into a subscription service.

The Sunday Times quoted a senior source as saying that the broadcaster could be forced to sell off most of its radio stations in a “massive pruning back” of its activities.

The source told the paper that Boris Johnson was “really strident” on the need for serious reform. They said there would be a consultation on replacing the licence fee with a subscription model, adding: “We will whack it.”

The paper said that the number of BBC television channels could also be reduced, the website scaled back and stars banned from cashing in on well-paid second jobs.

This potential attack will be seen as a further escalation of the hostilities between No 10 and the corporation, with many Tories still angry at its coverage of last year’s general election. The government is already consulting on proposals to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee, and ministers have suggested it could be abolished altogether when the BBC’s charter comes up for renewal in 2027.

It was reported that the review will be led by former culture secretary John Whittingdale, who was reappointed to his old department in last week’s reshuffle.

The Sunday Times quoted one source as saying: “We are not bluffing on the licence fee. We are having a consultation and we will whack it. It has got to be a subscription model. They’ve got hundreds of radio stations, they’ve got all these TV stations and a massive website. The whole thing needs massive pruning back.

“They should have a few TV stations, a couple of radio stations and massively curtailed online presence and put more money and effort into the World Service which is part of its core job. The PM is firmly of the view that there needs to be serious reform. He is really strident on this.”

The warning comes after the BBC chairman, Sir David Clementi, last week mounted a strong defence of the licence fee system. He warned that putting the broadcaster behind a paywall would undermine its ability to “bring the country together”.

Meanwhile the prime minister’s aides also turned their fire on highly paid BBC stars who made huge sums from outside work, suggesting they should be forced to donate the money to charity.

“It’s an outrage that people who make their profile at public expense should seek to give themselves further financial rewards and personal gain,” one source told the paper. “They’re basically making their names on the taxpayer and cashing in. The BBC should immediately halt this practice and give the money to good causes.”

Source: No 10 could scrap BBC licence fee in favour of a subscription model | Media | The Guardian

Not giving out interviews and destroying critical thought are hallmarks of fascism. In order for democracy to work, people need as much information as they can get, from as many informed angles as they can get. And this is something the BBC can do, due to it’s independent money source. It doesn’t have to pander to the Love Island crowd.

On Tuesday, Don HO, the developer of Notepad++, a free GPL source code editor and notepad application for Microsoft Windows, released version 7.8.1, prompting a social media firestorm and a distributed denial of service attack.

Notepad++ v7.8.1 was designated “the Free Uyghur edition,” in reference to the predominantly Muslim ethnic group in western China that faces ongoing human rights violations and persecution at the hands of Beijing.

“The site notepad-plus-plus.org has suffered DDoS attack from 1230 to 1330 Paris time,” HO said in an email to The Register. “I saw the [reduced] amount of visitors via Google analytics then the support of my host confirmed the attack. The DDoS attack has been stopped by an anti-DDoS service provided by our host [Cloudflare].”

Previous politically-themed Notepad++ releases have focused on Tiananmen Square and the terrorist attack on French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo.

A post on the project’s website explains HO’s decision to criticize the Chinese government, something companies with business interests in China generally try not to do for fear of retribution.

Some of the ‘issues’ raised by pro-China supports on the Notepad++ GitHub page … Click to enlarge

“People will tell me again to not mix politics with software/business,” HO’s post says. “Doing so surely impacts the popularity of Notepad++: talking about politics is exactly what software and commercial companies generally try to avoid.”

“The problem is, if we don’t deal with politics, politics will deal with us. We can choose to not act when people are being oppressed, but when it’s our turn to be oppressed, it will be too late and there will be no one for us. You don’t need to be Uyghur or a Muslim to act, you need only to be a human and have empathy for our fellow humans.”

Source: Just take a look at the carnage on Notepad++’s GitHub: ‘Free Uyghur’ release sparks spam tsunami by pro-Chinese • The Register

For years now, Twitter has been an important platform for disseminating news and sharing opinions about U.S. politics, and 22% of U.S. adults say they use the platform. But the Twitter conversation about national politics among U.S. adult users is driven by a small number of prolific political tweeters. These users make up just 6% of all U.S. adults with public accounts on the site, but they account for 73% of tweets from American adults that mention national politics.

Most U.S. adults on Twitter largely avoid the topic: The median user never tweeted about national politics, while 69% only tweeted about it once or not at all. Across all tweets from U.S. adults, just 13% focused on national politics, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis based on public tweets that were posted between June 2018 and June 2019.

Source: Small, prolific group of tweeters create most U.S. tweets on politics | Pew Research Center

YouTube is the biggest social media platform in the country, and, perhaps, the most misunderstood. Over the past few years, the Google-owned platform has become a media powerhouse where political discussion is dominated by right-wing channels offering an ideological alternative to established news outlets. And, according to new research from Penn State University, these channels are far from fringe—they’re the new mainstream, and recently surpassed the big three US cable news networks in terms of viewership.

The paper, written by Penn State political scientists Kevin Munger and Joseph Phillips, tracks the explosive growth of alternative political content on YouTube, and calls into question many of the field’s established narratives. It challenges the popular school of thought that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is the central factor responsible for radicalizing users and pushing them into a far-right rabbit hole.

The authors say that thesis largely grew out of media reports, and hasn’t been rigorously analyzed. The best prior studies, they say, haven’t been able to prove that YouTube’s algorithm has any noticeable effect. “We think this theory is incomplete, and potentially misleading,” Munger and Phillips argue in the paper. “And we think that it has rapidly gained a place in the center of the study of media and politics on YouTube because it implies an obvious policy solution—one which is flattering to the journalists and academics studying the phenomenon.”

Instead, the paper suggests that radicalization on YouTube stems from the same factors that persuade people to change their minds in real life—injecting new information—but at scale. The authors say the quantity and popularity of alternative (mostly right-wing) political media on YouTube is driven by both supply and demand. The supply has grown because YouTube appeals to right-wing content creators, with its low barrier to entry, easy way to make money, and reliance on video, which is easier to create and more impactful than text.

“This is attractive for a lone, fringe political commentator, who can produce enough video content to establish themselves as a major source of media for a fanbase of any size, without needing to acquire power or legitimacy by working their way up a corporate media ladder,” the paper says.

According to the authors, that increased supply of right-wing videos tapped a latent demand. “We believe that the novel and disturbing fact of people consuming white nationalist video media was not caused by the supply of this media ‘radicalizing’ an otherwise moderate audience,” they write. “Rather, the audience already existed, but they were constrained” by limited supply.

Other researchers in the field agree, including those whose work has been cited by the press as evidence of the power of YouTube’s recommendation system. Manoel Ribeiro, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and one of the authors of what the Penn State researchers describe as “the most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of YouTube radicalization to date,” says that his work was misinterpreted to fit the algorithmic radicalization narrative by so many outlets that he lost count.

For his study, published in July, Ribeiro and his coauthors examined more othan 330,000 YouTube videos from 360 channels, mostly associated with far right ideology. They broke the channels into four groups, based on their degree of radicalization. They found that a YouTube viewer who watches a video from the second-most-extreme group and follows the algorithm’s recommendations has only a 1-in-1,700 chance of arriving at a video from the most extreme group. For a viewer who starts with a video from the mainstream media, the chance of being shown a video from the most extreme group is roughly 1 in 100,000.

Munger and Phillips cite Ribeiro’s paper in their own, published earlier this month. They looked at 50 YouTube channels that researcher Rebecca Lewis identified in a 2018 paper as the “Alternative Influence Network.” Munger and Phillips’ reviewed the metadata for close to a million YouTube videos posted by those channels and mainstream news organizations between January 2008 and October 2018. The researchers also analyzed trends in search rankings for the videos, using YouTube’s API to obtain snapshots of how they were recommended to viewers at different points over the last decade.

Munger and Phillips divided Lewis’s Alternative Influence Network into five groups—from “Liberals” to “Alt-right”—based on their degree of radicalization. Liberals included channels by Joe Rogan and Steven Bonnell II. “Skeptics” included Carl Benjamin, Jordan Peterson, and Dave Rubin. “Conservatives,” included YouTubers like Steven Crowder, Dennis Prager of PragerU, and Ben Shapiro. The “Alt-Lite” category included both fringe creators that espouse more mainstream conservative views, like InfoWars’ Paul Joseph Watson, and those that express more explicitly white nationalist messages, like Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern. The most exteme category, the “Alt-Right,” refers to those who push strong anti-Semitic messages and advocate for the genetic superiority of white people, including Richard Spencer, Red Ice TV, and Jean-Francois Gariepy.

Munger and Phillips found that every part of the Alternative Influence Network rose in viewership between 2013 and 2016. Since 2017, they say, global hourly viewership of these channels “consistently eclipsed” that of the top three US cable networks combined. To compare YouTube’s global audience with the cable networks’ US-centric audience, the researchers assumed that each cable viewer watched all three networks for 24 hours straight each day, while each YouTube viewer watched a single video for only 10 minutes.

Overall viewership for the Alternative Influence Network has exploded in recent years, mirroring the far-right’s real-world encroachment on the national stage. But the report found that viewership on YouTube of the most extreme far-right content—those in the Alt-Lite and Alt-Right groups, specifically—has actually declined since 2017, while videos in the Conservative category more than doubled in popularity.

Lewis says that the decline could be explained by changes in the universe of right-wing video creators. Some of the creators she included in the list of Alternative Influence Network channels have lost popularity since her study was published, while others have emerged to take their place. However, this latter group was not included in the Penn State researchers’ report. Munger said the findings are preliminary and part of a working paper.

Nonetheless, Lewis praises the Penn State paper as essential reading for anyone studying YouTube politics. She lauded it as the first quantitative study on YouTube to shift focus from the recommendation algorithm—a transition that she says is crucial. Ribeiro agrees, describing it as a fascinating and novel perspective that he believes will encourage broader scholarly analysis in the field.

One thing that’s clear is that the remaining viewers of Alt-Right videos are significantly more engaged than other viewers, based on an analysis of ratio of likes and comments per video views.

Munger and Phillips say they were inspired to illustrate the complexity of YouTube’s alternative political ecosystem, and to encourage the development of more comprehensive, evidence-based narratives to explain YouTube politics.

“For these far-right groups, the audience is treating it much more as interactive space,” said Munger, in reference to the engagement graph above. “And this could lead to the creation of a community,” which is a much more potent persuasive force than any recommendation system. When it comes to radicalization, he says, these are the sorts of factors we should be concerned about—not the effects of each algorithmic tweak.

Source: Maybe It’s Not YouTube’s Algorithm That Radicalizes People | WIRED

The popular short-form video app will no longer run ads from politicians or candidates at any level of government because “the nature of paid political ads is not something we believe fits the TikTok platform experience,” TikTok’s VP of global business solutions, Blake Chandlee, announced in a blog post Thursday. This ban also covers “election-related ads, advocacy ads, or issue ads.”

And it’s true, TikTok didn’t become the fourth-largest social media platform in record time by facilitating debate and political discussions; we can already yell at each other on Facebook and Twitter for that. No, most users log on to TikTok to post silly lip-sync videos or their take on the newest trending hashtag, and if politics are mentioned it’s usually in reference to whatever’s the latest viral meme.

While TikTok has only begun experimenting with paid ad formats, Chandlee wrote that, throughout the process, the company is committed to preserving “the app’s light-hearted and irreverent feeling” that makes users want to spend their time there in the first place. Political ads often loaded with barbs aimed at tearing down opposing candidates just don’t vibe with that.

Source: TikTok Kicks Political Ads Off Its Platform Because Screw That Noise

The European Union has been reconsidering its copyright laws for several years, and for months we’ve been trudging towards a final vote. Well, that vote is scheduled for Tuesday, and if approved it could mean the end of the open internet as we know it.

Specifically, there are two troubling provisions in the EU’s new Copyright Directive: Articles 11 and 13. The former would impose a “link tax” on websites linking to external content they don’t own—which, on its face, is a solution to social giants freeloading on the work of news organizations without paying out any derived ad revenue. Article 13 would impose a content ID system on nearly all platforms to prevent the unauthorized uploading of copyrighted material.

In a perfect world, both of those ideas work to establish a fairer internet. But in the real world, it’s thought the link tax would be a slap on the wrist for major players and a death sentence for the small fry. A near-universal content ID system would also open up a raft of sites to the endless abuses of copyright trolls. My colleague Rhett Jones has a more expansive explanation of these Articles here.

To protest against the impending possibility of a stricter internet, a variety of major sites have engaged in blackouts or popover campaigns today, including Reddit, several EU-area Wikipedias, Twitch, and Pornhub. “Even though Reddit is an American company, we’d be highly impacted by changes to the law, as would our European users,” Reddit wrote in an announcement post today. “It could even impact the availability of services we provide to non-EU users.”

Internet pioneers Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf have also come out in opposition to the EU Copyright Directive’s potential chilling effects on information freedom, as has the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the United Nations’s special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression.

Protest banners and blackouts have become an increasingly common tactic for sites and platforms to push against sweeping legislation, and many of the aforementioned companies engaged in similar actions to preserve net neutrality and rebuke SOPA/PIPA. Given the glacial pace the EU Copyright Directive has been moving at, YouTube and Wikipedia Italy have previously protested the possible law change, while back in January Google threatened to kill its News service in Europe if the legislation goes through.

Source: Wikipedia and Reddit Stage Eleventh-Hour Protest Against Alarming EU Copyright Plan

Juncker said he was opting for French because “slowly but surely English is losing importance in Europe and France has elections this Sunday and I want the French people to understand what I am saying about the importance of the EU.”

The Commission president tackled the row that erupted over a private meeting he had with U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May last week. Following the meeting Juncker reportedly said: “I leave Downing Street 10 times more skeptical than I was before.” May gave a speech on the steps of Downing Street on Thursday in which she said some in Europe were trying influence the British election.

In Florence, Juncker said, “[Brexit] is no small event. Of course we will negotiate with our British friends in full transparency. But there should be no doubt whatsoever about the idea that it is the EU that is abandoning the U.K. It is the opposite in fact. It is the U.K. that is abandoning the EU.”

Source: Jean-Claude Juncker: ‘English is losing importance’

I find this highly surprising as English is the only unifying language in the EU. Globally no-one speaks French, so using French is sending a message to only a very small part of the EU population. Are they somehow better? If it had been about the coming French presidential elections I could have understood, but combined with a comment about English losing importance I am confused. Is this fake news?

The minister states that he thinks (his vision is backed by a bunch of closed source software vendors [Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, KPN, CapGemini, Ordina, ATOS, CGI and IBM]) that not having to buy licenses is offset by the costs of having to manage and pay for the deployments of open source software (OSS). Which is free for closed source. Oh, no. It isn’t. He also states that customising the software costs money for development, whilst forgetting that at least OSS can be customised and closed source is vendor dependent – you try customising a Microsoft product!

Minister Blok (Wonen en Rijksdienst

Source: Aanbieding 2e voortgangsrapportage uitvoering kabinetsreactie op Eindrapport Tijdelijke commissie ICT | Kamerstuk | Rijksoverheid.nl

Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. […] When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

via US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study | Common Dreams.

hahahaha this needed a study to show?!

The French have much stricter anti-hate speech laws than the US, so some Jewish students thought they would go after Twitter when users of their service posted anti-semitic content. Twitter removed the content, but didn’t identify the culprits. The students feel they have the right to personal retaliatiin or something and went crying to a French court. Twitter argues that only US courts have anything to say about it legally. http://www.ibtimes.com/print/twitter-sued-50-million-after-refusing-identify-authors-racist-anti-semitic-tweets-1145609

They’ve put him on the same status as Al Quaida, so who knows, will they try to assassinate him? And if US personell try to talk to Wikileaks employees, they’re spies and will be shot (I guess).

US calls Assange 'enemy of state'.

A project sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund FWF has made a detailed investigation on what viewers understand and how they evaluate the statements of politicians during televised debates. To this effect, software-assisted conversation analysis established how the individual social knowledge of viewers nurtures the interpretations – and reinterpretations – of political statements. For the first time, the roles played by differing interpretive frames in our comprehension of political reality were able to be assessed realistically and in detail.

FWF Austrian Science Fund – Press – Discursive Politics – Language with a Spin.

The Frame Project investigates fundamental processes of understanding and alignment in public opinion formation. Effects of political rhetoric depend on how it is understood and reacted to by audiences

Frame Project

A study of 61 million Facebook users finds that using online social networks to urge people to vote has a much stronger effect on their voting behavior than spamming them with information via television ads or phone calls.

via 'Social Voting' Really Does Rock the Vote – ScienceNOW.

Adhocracy is a policy drafting tool for distributed groups. It allows members of organizations or the public to compose or vote documents that represent the policy of the group.

In order to allow cooperation, Adhocracy uses LiquidDemocracy, a set of ideas that include delegating a user’s voting rights to another to enable both active and passive participation in the process. We also implement ideas from Direkter Parlamentarismus, a theory of mass participation in parliamentary processes.

An alternative is LiquidFeedback, an open-source software, powering internet platforms for proposition development and decision making.

The basic idea is a democratic system in which most issues are decided (or strongly suggested to representatives) by direct referendum. Considering nobody has enough time and knowledge for every issue, votes can be delegated by topic. Furthermore delegations are transitive and can be revoked at any time. Liquid Democracy is sometimes referred to as Delegated or Proxy Voting.

From the start of March, the new Citizens’ Initiative Act will come into force.
According to the new law, a required minimum of 50,000 citizens of voting age can launch a bill that Parliament then has to process.
On the Open Ministry website, anyone can present an idea for a law initiative. If the idea wins enough support, the ministry’s volunteer workers will work on it and turn it into a presentable bill for the MPs to chew over.

From the beginning of March, citizens’ initiative bills can be sent for parliamentary handling if they are signed by 50,000 people entitled to vote

via Helsingin Sanomat – International Edition – Home.

Awesome and about time that the people get to more directly rule a democracy!

Some idiots think that the city of Amsterdam should do anything to set up a .amsterdam global top level domain to market the city (so you could have www.stupid.amsterdam as a web address).

'Gemeente moet topleveldomein .amsterdam claimen' | Webwereld.

That, hoewever, costs $185,000 New gTLD Applicant guidebook, ch. 1.5 as well as having to set up a domain registry (which is difficult as well as involved).

Basically the PVV, backed by Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, have a few sensationalist headlines from a religious magazine that no-one knows (Reformatiorich Dagblad) or reads and a few from a more serious newspaper (AD) that aren’t so sensationalist, and on the basis of this they’ve decided to open up a Hitlerite plan to turn citizens into anonymous spies and snitches on a very directed group of people – middle and eastern Europeans.

Fortunatley everyone on the internet seems to be making fun of the plan. Unfortunately, NL is populated with plenty of people who will take it seriously.

Meldpunt Midden en Oost-Europeanen.

Aside from the fact that NL is a trading nation and thus has a disproportionate amount of people living and working outside of the Netherlands and thus having multiple nationalities, it makes it seem like having the Dutch nationality is like being a member of some kind of exclusive club. What nonsense! Being a member of a nationality gives you rights and privileges by being born into or having worked your way into a certain way of thinking. Your nation – the one that exists by the grace of your taxes – is indebted to you as an invidual and should protect you and the way of life you represent.

For minister Donner to try to reduce the amount of protection as well as xenophobically pushing away excellent candidates for nationality is a symptom of times where we are pushed to hate each other instead of trying to grow together in humanity. OK, that might sound a bit idealistic, but shouldn’t you be trying to recruit people into your way of thinking, into the nationhood that you want to promote globally, instead of repelling them?

Expat-Nederlander wil twee paspoorten houden – Binnenland – VK.

PvdA zweert reparatie van netneutraliteit | Webwereld.

It looks like where copyright goons and the NL are failing by wanting to turn our society into a surveillance society, the unelected EU Court may come to citizens’ rescue:

Advocate General Cruz Villalón considers that the installation of that filtering and blocking system is a restriction on the right to respect for the privacy of communications and the right to protection of personal data, both of which are rights protected under the Charter of Fundamental Rights. By the same token, the deployment of such a system would restrict freedom of information, which is also protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

via European Court of Justice To Outlaw Internet Filtering; Esp. For Copyright Enforcement – Falkvinge on Infopolicy.