Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Chris.
How Kiwi Farms, the worst place on the web, was shut down — www.theguardian.com
If you haven’t heard of Kiwi Farms – you’re very lucky. Let’s start by saying that it was founded with the intention to harass an individual and then broadened out to be extremely transphobic and to ruin some innocent lives. But the story’s inclusion in this newsletter isn’t about any of the horrifying specifics – this is about how the idea of deplatforming intersects with some of the biggest debates in media, around free speech and ‘cancel culture’.
Firstly, as has been noted, deplatforming works, and should absolutely be used when real harm is being advocated. ‘Free speech’ is usually the shield that gets raised in defence of the deplatformed, however, and was in this case: “Still run by founder Matthew Prince, a startup CEO in the classic mould, [Kiwi Farms’ old web host Cloudflare] tries to take a firm stance against content moderation, arguing that its role as an infrastructure provider is important enough that it needs to be provided to all, lest too much arbitrary power sit with one company.”
But that argument immediately falls apart when real world harm is being done. For one thing, advocating violence against someone is curtailing their free speech. For another thing, the right to free speech does not automatically mean access to reach.
European news agencies reinforce Brussels reporting with the launch of the European Presseportal — www.presseportal.de
I’m fully bought in to the idea that Europe needs its own newsroom to tell its own story, and this is definitely a step towards that. One caveat – it sounds like the lion’s share of the content will only be distributed within the European newswires themselves.
Doxxed, threatened, and arrested: Russia’s war on Wikipedia editors — restofworld.org
Wikipedia is a much-maligned but absolutely invaluable service (not least because it boiled the Mail’s piss that time). And if you wanted any further proof of of its legitimacy as an information source, look no further than Russia’s ongoing campaign against it, which threatens the safety of its volunteer editors.
5 evergreen tips from 18 news media leaders — www.twipemobile.com
There are some phenomenal names on this list, all sharing their views from the tippety top of the media mountain. Curation of insights like this is always valuable, but doubly so when you can actually walk away with some tried and tested practical tips as well.
Announcement:
Media Moments 2022 is coming! — voices.media
Media Moments 2022 – sponsored by membership & subscription suite Poool – will bring together the key events which have shaped the media and publishing industry this year. We’ll be launching it at a virtual event on November 30th. Pre-register here to get sent the report as soon as it lands.
Thursday throwback: Which publishers won the pandemic? — voices.media
Here’s a blast from the past. You might want to put the pandemic out of your mind – I know I do – but it’s worth remembering that some publishers did a lot of good for their audiences during that time. We celebrated that good work in this throwback episode.
