CFOM Seminar Series Recordings 2023/24

In the first of the Centre for Freedom of the Media’s (CFOM) online seminar series, legal consultant Gill Phillips talks about existential and practical threats to journalists and journalism including issues surrounding AI, social media and fake news. Gill also discusses legal issues that journalists face including Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, censorship and source protection.

Gill joined the BBC from private practice in 1987. She dealt with all the pre- and post- transmission aspects of broadcasting, including advising programme departments (both TV and Radio) on a whole range of pre- and post- publication media law-issues including libel, contempt, court-reporting, disclosure of sources, breach of confidence and the Official Secrets Act. She then moved to the The Sun and the News of the World, and later to the Times and Sunday Times dealing with pre-publication issues and post publication complaints and claims. Gill moved to Guardian News & Media as the Director of Editorial Legal in May 2009, where she advised on phone-hacking, Wikileaks, the Leveson Inquiry, the NSA leaks from Edward Snowden and many other data leak and investigative series. She retired as GNM’s Editorial Legal Director in June 2023, and remains as a legal consultant for them. She is a co-editor for the 27th Edition of McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists, due out in 2024.

Amid the twin forces of democratic backsliding and digital disruption, news outlets are having to find new ways to sustain and defend independent reporting. This seminar will delve into findings from Freedom House’s most recent report, Reviving News Media in an Embattled Europe. Based on a series of interviews with journalists and media experts in Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland, lead researcher Jessica White shines a light on the strategies that independent newsrooms are developing to address issues of financial viability, engage younger and more diverse audiences, promote trust, and defend themselves against threats that undermine and stifle their work. These responses can inform broader policy approaches to reviving news media’s role as a core component of a healthy democracy.

Gender-based online violence against women journalists is one of the biggest contemporary threats to press freedom globally. This talk describes a dashboard we are developing for monitoring and exploring relevant social media data, as well as some findings in the form of recently published big data case studies investigating online violence targeted at a number of emblematic women journalists from around the world. In order to conduct this large scale analysis of online abuse, we have developed NLP tools to identify and characterise online abuse from Twitter targeted at specific individuals, with the ultimate aim of developing an “early warning system” to help predict the escalation of online abuse into offline harm and violence, based on indicators from the analysis. The dashboard we have developed provides a rich understanding of abuse towards one or more journalists, but also comparisons between different journalists over time, and indicators of factors such as coordinated abusive behaviour, gaslighting, or potential for escalation to offline harm. Finally, we present a set of indicators we have developed that signify potential escalation of abuse, and some guidelines for monitoring violence against women journalists.