"Digital trust initiatives strive to address complex problems and have multiple goals: from empowering users, to improving journalistic practices, to driving audiences and revenues to trusted news sources—and they cannot achieve such goals alone. Bolstering trustworthy news outlets and the content
...
they produce in the digital information ecosystem is no easy undertaking. It entails interfacing with a diverse set of stakeholders—readers, journalists, news organizations, platforms, and advertisers—all of whom have distinct behaviors, goals, and incentives. Yet, the potential payback is immense if all the parts in this complex system can be aligned toward a similar objective. Cooperation among these initiatives as well as with other key industry actors in this sector will be key. There are signs that such collaboration is underway.
The Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI) emergency protocol powered by NewsGuard aims to support news outlets at risk and will be tested for the first time in Ukraine later this year. It is a potentially promising example of how these initiatives can work together to help newsrooms around the world establish their credibility and transparency in times of crisis. There are also indications of increased cooperation between these initiatives and tech companies. A recently launched project shows the potential for collaboration among multiple digital news trust initiatives and online platforms: the Microsoft Journalism Hub, a resource center built to connect the journalism community with tools, technology, services, and partner programs. Among its features, it includes NewsGuard’s indicator tools and offers support for JTI’s certification program. Digital trust initiatives have set ambitious goals, but their ambitions for change at a global scale remain largely unproven as these efforts are still quite young. Additionally, the opacity of platforms’ content curation and moderation processes, and the lack of data on advertisers’ investment decisions, contributes to a dearth of concrete evidence on how these actors are actually using these indicators and standards—if they are using them at all. The extent to which these initiatives will gain broader traction is yet to be seen." (Conclusions)
more
"This book has compiled the tech policy debate into a toolkit for policy makers, legal experts, and academics seeking to address platform dominance and its impact on society today. It discusses the global consensus around technology regulation with recommendations of cutting-edge policy innovations
...
from around the world. It also explores the proposed policy toolkit through comprehensive coverage of existing and future policy on data, antitrust, competition, freedom of expression, jurisdiction, fake news, elections, liability, and accountability. The book identifies potential policy impacts on global communication, user rights, public welfare, and economic activity. It outlines a policy framework that address the interlocking challenges of contemporary tech regulation and offer actionable solutions for the technological future." (Publisher description)
more