Reposted from TED.com. Go to the original post for full transcript and more resources

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Unfortunately, that’s in itself fake news. The link tax won’t help fight fake news – it will make the problem worse.

The two main reasons are:

1. Putting a price tag on spreading articles from legitimate press publications (or at the bare minimum, adding legal uncertainty) is guaranteed to end up decreasing the circulation of professional news. The visibility of other sources will in turn be boosted, including fake news and propaganda.
2. The link tax will disadvantage small, new and independent publishers who rely on being listed in aggregators and having their content shared on social media. As a result, innovation in the sector and media pluralism will be harmed, which will impede the diverse and vibrant news ecosystem we need to effectively counter fake news.

Academic consensus against

In an open letter released on Wednesday, 169 scholars (including professors of journalism studies) say the plan will “play into the hands of producers of fake news” because it will “restrict further the circulation of quality news”, and thus “not guarantee the availability of reliable information so much as the dominance of fake news”.

Previous studies found that the link tax “may well set back the function of the press as public watchdog” and ”will not foster quality journalism”.

Journalists oppose it

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project calls the link tax “a giant step backward in the fight against misinformation”, because it “would severely limit the ability of OCCRP and other independent media organizations to provide accurate and fair reporting”.

A coalition of innovative publishers representing hundreds of news outlets – who the Commission claims would benefit from the link tax – are likewise fighting against the plan, warning that it will “stifle media pluralism” and have “serious negative effects on the quality of the press”.

After years of experience with the similar German law, the journalists’ association DJV concluded: “Best abolish it”.

Competent conservatives disagree

Dorothee Bär, Germany’s new Digital Minister and a member of the staunchly conservative CSU, said that she rejects the extra copyright for news sites because it “hasn’t stood the test” and “doesn’t work”.

The CDU’s internet policy spokesperson in the German Bundestag – a fellow party member of both Günther Oettinger (who originally proposed the law) and Axel Voss (who is pushing to make it even worse) – likewise recognises the link tax as “extremely dangerous” and “a bad proposal”, correctly warning that it may lead platforms to remove real news and thus elevate dubious sources.

Jumping on the buzzword bandwagon

The Commission’s own high level expert group on fake news and disinformation did not recommend the neighbouring right. This supports the suspicion that it was included not for factual reasons, but in an attempt to jump on a buzzword bandwagon to shore up support for the Commission’s struggling proposal.

When the neighbouring right proposal was originally presented, combating fake news was not given as a motive. Adding it as a retroactive justification, unsupported by a proper impact assessment, is mission creep that’s in conflict with the much-touted principles of “better regulation”.

What to do instead

If the Commission is serious about fighting fake news, it needs to correct its course on the neighbouring right immediately.

• The “presumption rule”, an alternative proposal supported by the Greens/EFA group as well as former Parliament rapporteur Therese Comodini and multiple member states in the Council, would help publishers enforce existing copyrights without sabotaging the circulation of legitimate news.
• The Greens/EFA group today launched a report on alternative models of financing investigative journalism, which suggests a number of policy solutions.
• Regulating ad targeting, as I argued in Parliament last week, may be the best option: Ending the profiling arms race, in which internet giants gather ever more data on us in order to ever more precisely target ads, would not just protect our privacy and eliminate one way of delivering fake news to those most susceptible to it, but also return a share of the advertising market to content businesses like the news.

To the extent possible under law, the creator has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

Lead image: Alan Levine, Flickr

Originally published on Julia Reda’s blog

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We are living in turbulent times for electoral democracy. But it didn’t start with the Brexit referendum and the election of Trump. Over the period 2006 – 2016 the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index recorded a decline in democratic health for more than half the 167 countries it monitors.

Join the P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens and many others for this special day of Democracy, as part of the Imagine! festival of ideas and politics, celebrated in Belfast from the 12th to the 18th of March. The text below is taken from the Festival’s page on Democracy Day.

We are living in turbulent times for electoral democracy. But it didn’t start with the Brexit referendum and the election of Trump. Over the period 2006 – 2016 the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index recorded a decline in democratic health for more than half the 167 countries it monitors.

In many parts of the world citizens are losing faith in the electoral system that had been considered the consensus vehicle of human progress over much of the last century. Northern Ireland is no exception to this trend.

Whilst populist demagogues would have us believe ‘strong’ leadership and a return to authoritarianism is the answer, proponents of deliberative democracy believe quite the reverse – that a key part of the solution to this malaise is a deeper involvement of citizens in decision-making.

Democracy Day is a Building Change Trust event and is back for its second year at Imagine 2018. It’s a full dawn to dusk programme exploring the health of democracy, the role of citizens and the latest local and international thinking about what needs to be done to reinvigorate democracy and make it fit for purpose in the 21st Century.

Attendees will get a hands-on exploration of innovations like Citizens’ Assemblies and Participatory Budgeting, as well as hearing from inspiring international speakers including Michel Bauwens from the Peer to Peer Foundation and our evening keynote Carmen Perez, co-organiser of the Women’s March on Washington.

With the exception of the Michel Bauwens event ‘Commoning Our Democracy’, all of the daytime events for Democracy Day are covered by a single registration – simply register once on any of the Democracy Day daytime event pages to attend as many events as you wish. The evening events on the Good Friday Agreement and Carmen Perez’s talk also require separate registration. All events are free – here’s the lineup for the day.

Programme

the people’s breakfast

Kick off Democracy Day with a hearty free breakfast and a short drama performance to set the scene.

putting people at the heart of decision making

How will a Citizens’ Assembly for Northern Ireland work?

commoning our democracy

Michel Bauwens leads a workshop on the emerging crisis in democratic nation-states

the end of facts? taking on fake news

FactCheckNI introduces fact-checking champions from Methodist College Belfast.

debate, deliberate, decide: community conversations about education

A workshop exploring the emotive issue of the loss of primary schools within communities.

participatory budgeting works: a practical introduction

Find out about Participatory Budgeting and how you can decide!

the good friday agreement: is it still fit for purpose?

Twenty years on, participants in this session will examine the constitutional arrangements bequeathed by the Good Friday Agreement.

keynote speaker: carmen perez

Democracy Day’s keynote speaker is Carmen Perez, National Co-Chair of the Women’s March on Washington.

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Giving both P2P and other visions their due space

You can support this “cultural provocation” in several ways, explained in the FAQ, but my main reason to present it here is another. As you can see yourself, the current list of suggestions, contains both too few, and at the same time too many P2P-related concepts.

The list contains too few P2P-related suggestions, because “P2P alternatives” is a really, really wide field. The concepts that the first participants have suggested so far only give a very partial idea of it. P2P advocates worldwide, but especially from Europe, please add your own suggestions!

When I say that the P2P-related suggestions are “too many”, instead, I simply mean that (SO FAR!)  they are too big a percentage of the total to make the whole list as comprehensive as it should be, to be of any help at all. This is just an obvious consequence of the fact that the first contributors mostly come from my own social circle,which likely contains much more P2P advocates than the average.

But no “foundation for a common cultural literacy” can be such, especially when assembled in a p2p-like way, if it is does not mentions concepts of as many different “categories”, human activities and points of view as possible. Even if the whole proposal is a provocation, with NO ambition to be THE best possible book of that kind… the more diverse its content is, the more  meaningful it becomes. But no single person, not even a new Leonardo da Vinci, which obviously I am not, could do a decent job alone. So I am here to ask everybody reading this post to please:

• just go and add your own suggestions (that is the only way to collect suggestions!!!). The bottom of this posts suggests one possible way to do it quickly.
• (above all) invite as many contacts as yours to add theirs, and spread the invitation

For any question, just email me. Last but not least, there is also a proposal for a “for-Italy-only” version of the same book, if you want to share that too!

THANKS!

Photo by angelaathomas

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Globalized capitalism has inflicted so many defeats upon the working class and people all over the world that it’s hard to give an account of them. Still, everything isn’t sad. In the middle of all this misery there are glimpses of light – if you know where to look for them. In fact, some of these bright spots come as a result of the misery, because they can be turned to our advantage.

Translated by Anne Merethe Erstad for the Norwegian original

The war on cash and the war on free speech

As previously shown through a number of examples, the international finance capitalism has specific plans to wind up cash as an option for payment. In India, this war on cash is led by the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, and his allies. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a leading participant in the “Better Than Cash Alliance” along with Ford Foundation, Clinton Foundation, Citi Foundation, Omidyar Network (eBay), Coca Cola, USAID and the UN – among others.

In Norway, the Norwegian bank DNB has taken the lead. And since politicians in general are trained to do as financial capitalism bids, we can say with almost total certainty that legislation banning cash will be passed. If cash payment is banned by law, we will no longer have money. Or rather: we will no longer have any control over our own money. Whether we’ll be able to use them or not, will be decided by the banks and the authorities. We can no longer withdraw money from the bank and hide them under the mattress, even if the banks should introduce a five percent negative interest rate. And if the authorities decide that a certain person should be blocked from their account, they cannot buy as much as a bus ticket or a piece of bread. The totalitarian society on steroids.

This neo-fascism, or this post-democratic society – or whatever we should name this nightmare – is matched by the draconic legislations against so-called “fake news” and the introduction of public-private censorship bodies. As noted before, a militarization of opinion formers worthy that of a dictatorship, is taking place. And it is happening without the slightest protest from those who supposedly support the freedom of the press and free speech.

Light in the darkness

And where do we find anything positive in all this, you may ask. A reasonable question, indeed. It appears dark as the night, like a dystopia by George Orwell or Albert Huxley. But watch closely, and you’ll find bright spots.

The cash ban will have extraordinary negative effects, but it will also force those of us in the resistance front to think anew. Our defensive struggle can no longer remain merely defensive. The enemy forces us to create our own currency. And they force us to organize collectively in new and interesting ways.

Alternative currencies are not as innovative as they may sound. There probably exist hundreds of them throughout the world, perhaps thousands. According to Wikipedia, Local Economy Trading Systems were particularly popular in the 20^th century and the web-based encyclopaedia also mentions a large number of community currencies in the USA.

Co-operative movements and closely knitted local communities are among those who have gained the most from community currencies. The European fiscal cliff has led to the establishment of several varieties of local currencies in a number of communities all over Europe. It’s not very hard to imagine how a co-operative movement or a network of co-operatives can benefit from this. Like money in general, these currencies will express a certain value, which makes it possible to change one value into another. As long as the co-operatives only trade amongst themselves, they have no need for dollars, Euro – or Norwegian kroners.

A few years ago I watched a news story on Italian RAI 3 from southern Italy about a small, poor village where many Albanians had settled several hundred years back. This village had established a community currency with two values; one Che (Guevara) and one Skanderbeg (the Albanian national hero). According to the news report, this worked well for the inter-trading among the village people. In the village where I am an inhabitant, in Tolfa near Rome, we could very well have had such a local currency. Barter-economy still exists and could be developed further. In addition there are many local craft businesses. I haven’t carried out any serious study of this, but I wouldn’t rule out that one Euro spent at the bakery passes five pairs of hands in Tolfa before it leaves the village. We could call the currency collinaro, as those of us living there are called collinari: the hill people.

The southern Italian che and skanderbeg were most likely paper based. But there is nothing stopping these currencies from being electronically based. In Norway, the one who has performed the most extensive work in this area is Trond Andresen at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology). He has demonstrated how this can be accomplished, all the way from the local to the national level. Andersen has argued that this system can work on a national level for countries in a time of crisis. However, with a cash ban coming up, it would be even more relevant as a tool of resistance, as means to control a part of one’s own added value without the bank interference and to keep a part of our co-operation and inter-trade outside the surveillance files.

This means that the banks’ and the states’ abuse more or less forces us to organise collectively and produce samples of a future collective society.

This applies to the censorship on social media as well. Increased censorship and harassment will make Facebook and similar systems irrelevant for publishing and discourse. This will enforce solutions on the outside, alternative social media and new platforms. This is more problematic, because the strength of the Internet is the fact that it is a global productive force. But I am absolutely sure it is possible to find a way around this as well. My personal contribution in the near future is to launch a web based medium which will bring the experiences from this blog several steps forward.

The 0.01 percent is extremely powerful, but obviously frightened

Those who benefit the most from the way global capitalism has developed, are the richest 0.01 percent. And among them, the ultra-rich “Masters of the Universe”. They are extremely powerful and some of them have personal assets exceeding entire countries’ gross national product. At the same time they are very few, and while they can buy whomever they want to defend them, the measures they are taking at the moment, above all the censorship, show that they are also very frightened. They know that if the 99 percent organise to fight them, they’re done for. When they cannot even tolerate competition from small blogs and alternative media lacking both money and power, they reveal their fear of rebellion and their fear of losing both power and capital. Their measures don’t reflect their strength, but their weakness, their panic.

These are very important lessons the ultra-rich have given us. A gift of which they are oblivious – they hardy understand what they have given away. And it is crucial to understand how this gift can be put to use.

Le Cri du peuple, Jacques Tardi (2001)
The Paris comune

The future society starts now

This points even further, to a central element in what I have called Communism 5.0. It is a collective society where the producers control the means of productions – jointly. And there’s no need to wait for a revolution fifty or hundred years ahead. In fact, it is possible to start the construction of this future society now. We can start tomorrow. Collective interaction and organizing around such projects will teach us to build a society and it will enhance people’s self confidence and trust in their own strengths. We’re not talking utopia. We’re talking about something we know can be done. And even more important: This has to be done, because the alternative is to be crushed beneath the weight of the ruling class’ power machinery. Some people dislike my calling it Communism 5.0, but that doesn’t matter. The Norwegian author Odd Eidem, once said: “Call me whatever you like. Call me the city tram!”

In this perspective, the 0.01 percent is not our worst enemy. They are few and they are frightened. We can handle them. Our worst enemy is our own feebleness, our own division and our own slave mentality. If we can liberate ourselves from this, we can save the world from the globalists and their gang.

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