As part of our objective to develop new standards to measure media pluralism online, the CMPF is now taking submissions of ideas/blog posts to be published as part of CMPF Discussion Series and for papers to be published on the EUI website or the RSCAS working paper Series. Authors of selected papers will be invited to present their papers and attend a workshop at the EUI in Florence in June on media pluralism in the digital age.
Over the last several years, significant changes have been observed in the news ecosystem, including the ways news is produced, disseminated and consumed. Technological advancements have created new opportunities to support media freedom and media pluralism, but have also prompted new sources of risk, including, but not limited to: the spread and impact of disinformation; lack of transparency of algorithm-driven news recommenders; increasing importance of private technological companies in governing communication online; and decreasing sustainability of legacy news media and journalism. These issues are largely perceived as having an impact on the public sphere, pluralism, and on the health of democracy. As such they are high on the agenda of public discussions and of policy making in EU, and worldwide.
However, there is still an insufficient understanding of the extent of these challenges, both on the transnational and national level, especially taking into account differences in media systems. There is also a lack of consensus on what should be the right approach(es) to ensure that the standards set to protect freedom of expression and media pluralism in traditional media systems are also respected online, and/or whether new standards are needed.
In 2019, under the Media Pluralism Monitor Project the CMPF aims to help fill this gap by providing an essential and comprehensive study on the conditions and standards against which to assess risks to information pluralism online. Read more about the MPM2020 here.
The authors of selected papers will be invited to present their work in Florence in June 2019 during a workshop on media pluralism in the digital age. Please fill in the form below to submit. Your blog post or paper should be submitted by April 30th. If you require any further information please email us at cmpf@eui.eu.
Read below some suggested research questions but feel free to create your own:
- What is the meaning and what could be a workable definition of media pluralism in the online environment?
- To what extent the impact of online media and online platforms (especially social media platforms) is relevant to assess the overall risks for media pluralism in a given country?
- To what extent algorithms and AI are relevant in the media pluralism debate? How to measure their impact and their bias on the free flow of information?
- What is the role of social media in the online ecosystem in tackling disinformation and hate speech?
- What are the benchmarks to assess the risks for pluralism in the online environment and how are they measurable?
- What is the role of the NRAs in tackling disinformation?
- How to preserve, finance and support, technically and economically, professional journalism in the digital era?
- What is the role of big data in shaping the flow of information and news, and how to measure it?
- How to tackle targeted disinformation during the electoral campaigns?
- How to measure media literacy and critical thinking?
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