Connected & Disaffected

LEGACY PRINT MEDIA HATE THEM! Local tech company discovers one weird trick to gain positive press coverage FAST! We sit down with journalist Alexander Fanta to talk Google's place in the media landscape, how their funding of local news or grants for "innovation" may well have a more sinister purpose, and how other organisations are already using the unsteady revenue model of legacy print media to warp the media landscape to their liking. Links to Alex’s work https://netzpolitik.org/author/alexander-fanta/ https://twitter.com/FantaAlexx https://www.otto-brenner-stiftung.de/wissenschaftsportal/publikationen/titel/google-the-media-patron/aktion/show/obspaec/Publication/ More background: https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/are-google-and-facebook-really-the-future-of-journalism-new-policies-risk-making-it-so.php Please note - Google is far from alone Facebook have a similar playbook in the USA, but hide their funding in a ‘feature’ available only to publishers called Facebook News. (Us neither). https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/04/19/is-facebook-buying-off-the-new-york-times/ Like what you hear? Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/connectedanddisaffected Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/canddpodcast Join us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/ Find us on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/C_and_D_Podcast/ Subscribe on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2xVDd0NSp6gsh6Ku2odlop or find us on ITunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conn…ed/id1244893114 ___ This podcast is part of the Are We Europe Podcast Family, a collective of like-minded European podcasts. You can become a member of Are We Europe at www.areweeurope.com/member

This week we're all about Tax, and kicking off we speak to Paul Hebden of Tax Justice UK about their recent survey of attitudes to tax in the UK. The results may surprise you. Suitably sprung from all the tax talk, the gang go on to talk Tax Day (it seems like it comes earlier each year.) Are the Tories actually doing something progressive about taxation? Why has the Labour response been so weak? And how do we channel public opinion into making a tax system that actually works for everyone? Check out Tax Justice UK on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TaxJusticeUK And their report "Tax and Public Opinion": https://www.taxjustice.uk/tax-and-public-opinion.html Like what you hear? Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/connectedanddisaffected Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/canddpodcast Join us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/ Find us on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/C_and_D_Podcast/ Subscribe on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2xVDd0NSp6gsh6Ku2odlop or find us on ITunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conn…ed/id1244893114 ___ This podcast is part of the Are We Europe Podcast Family, a collective of like-minded European podcasts. You can become a member of Are We Europe at www.areweeurope/member

This week the gang are catching up with Ifeoma Ozoma again, to discuss her efforts to introduce legislation in California to address the muzzling of workers who have been pushed out of organisations due to discrimination. Ifeoma previously spoke with them in Episode 33 regarding her efforts to tackle disinformation on Pinterest's platform, and her decision to speak publicly about discrimination against her and others at the company. The gang follow this up with a discussion around the power of individuals taking a legal stand against exploitative and discriminatory employers: touching on the recent UK Supreme Court ruling against Uber, the resignation of Matthew Taylor as the government's employment Tsar, and the $200m lobbying efforts that pushed through (the ridiculous) Proposition 22 in California. Follow Ifeoma Ozoma on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IfeomaOzoma Read about the "Silenced No More Act" here: https://sd20.senate.ca.gov/news/2021-02-08-senator-leyva-introduces-%E2%80%9Csilenced-no-more-act%E2%80%9D Like what you hear? Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/connectedanddisaffected Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/canddpodcast Join us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/ Find us on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/C_and_D_Podcast/ Subscribe on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2xVDd0NSp6gsh6Ku2odlop or find us on ITunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/connected-disaffected/id1244893114

The gang are talking environmental crisis this week, centred around Rowan's interview with Adrienne Buller of Common Wealth. Her recent paper explored the problems with "ESG" finance, and the issue of relying on private finance more generally to address pressing social and environmental needs. We then expand on just how much better we need to be doing, and why "WWII levels" of public sector intervention and investment may be very necessary. Adrienne is on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/adribuller Check out Adrienne's research: https://www.common-wealth.co.uk/reports/doing-well-by-doing-good-examining-the-rise-of-environmental-social-governance-esg-investing Adrienne shared some further reading on greenwash for interested listeners: - https://influencemap.org/report/Climate-Funds-and-Fossil-Fuels-8f2c813ed814fe5b1eef61b48497b592 - https://thefinanceinfo.com/2021/01/17/esg-accounting-needs-to-cut-through-the-greenwash/ - https://cyberbizsource.com/2021/02/22/esg-investment-favours-tax-avoiding-tech-companies/ - https://www.ft.com/content/d8a77b40-990e-4329-8629-a18ddbb39f0c We've also got a longer version of the interview with Adrienne Buller - touching on bizarre financial instruments, and Benjamin Braun's work on asset management transforming corporate governance (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/v6gue) - for subscribers on our Patreon www.patreon.com/connectedanddisaffected Like what you hear? Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/canddpodcast?lang=en Join us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/ Find us on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/C_and_D_Podcast/ Subscribe on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2xVDd0NSp6gsh6Ku2odlop or find us on ITunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/connected-disaffected/id1244893114

People are FINALLY paying attention to the potential of health data - it just took a global pandemic to make it happen. It's kind of a no-brainer, when you dig into it, but governments apparently needed a push. Rowan interviewed Jess Morley, Policy Lead at the Evidence Based Medicine DataLab at the University of Oxford, about her recent paper on online disinformation and how our information environments impact our health. The guiding question was: Why can we quarantine people who are sick and not bits of information that we know are 'sick'? Read the paper here: https://www.publichealthpost.org/viewpoints/health-threats-in-the-infosphere/ Follow Jess: https://twitter.com/jessRmorley And the DataLab: http://www.thedatalab.org/ Happily, there is actually some legislation on the horizon that could mitigate at least some of this problem. Warren takes us on a deep dive into the EU and UK Government's response to disinformation and online harms, including a full breakdown of the Tory governments recent proposals to regulate online harm - a rare instance of something the podcast can broadly get behind. Get the full UK paper here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fact-sheet-online-harms-full-government-response In general, healthcare needs to be modernised - but not in the way that Tories tend to put it. We don't mean more cuts, more manager or more external consultants. We mean making use of the kinds of data that have become core parts of most other sectors. As Jess put it, there is a lot more we could be doing with health data if it wasn't being handled in Excel!