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!

The gang return for the last one of the year, looking back across a year of pandemic, incompetence, and one more Brexit crisis. Ho Ho Ho.

Rowan discusses how different countries across Europe and the world have responded to COVID, and how Britain compares. Warren takes us through the 19 U-Turns achieved in 8 months by UK's Tory Government, and the themes sitting behind these. And Raj brings the family round the bonfire for one last chat about the final failures of Brexit talks, before the UK is plunged into months of additional economic pain and rising prices (at best) for no tangible gain. Other than impending neoliberal reforms of the UK...

Like what you hear?

Support us on Patreon!

www.patreon.com/connectedanddisaffected

Find us on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/C_and_D_Podcast/

Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/canddpodcast?lang=en

Join us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/

Subscribe on Spotify:

open.spotify.com/show/2xVDd0NSp6gsh6Ku2odlop

or find us on ITunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conn…ed/id1244893114

This week it's an election double-header. First, Warren takes us through a Week In Bullshit on Trumpism: is the USA really so polarised? Will Trump supporters ever swing back to the centre? And how much is the media exaggerating the threat of the populist right?

Moving on, we interview Jon Narcross of the Electoral Reform Society about their work, what a better system of voting might look like, and how change might come about here in the UK.

See the ERS's work here: https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/

If you're a Labour member, check out Labour for a New Democracy here: https://www.labourforanewdemocracy.org.uk/

Like what you hear?

Support us on Patreon!

www.patreon.com/connectedanddisaffected

Find us on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/C_and_D_Podcast/

Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/canddpodcast?lang=en

Join us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/

Subscribe on Spotify:

open.spotify.com/show/2xVDd0NSp6gsh6Ku2odlop

or find us on ITunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conn…ed/id1244893114

The gang return this week with a special episode devoted the issue of diversity in economics, specifically Black representation and the fields relative silence in the face of upheavals we've seen this summer

Rowan talks us through some of the survey research around the state of the field, and Warren sits down with Fadekemi Abiru - a female black economist and data scientist working in the UK - to discuss the issues and effects of Black representation in economics, bringing to life her own work informing social policy, and highlighting the great work of the Black Economists Network (TBEN) to expand representation and influence within the field.

Fadekemi shouts out to Raj Chetty's impactful data charts: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/01/11/raj-chetty-in-14-charts-big-findings-on-opportunity-and-mobility-we-should-know/

As well as Mariana Mazzucato: https://marianamazzucato.com/

Be sure to follow TBEN:

https://twitter.com/TheBlackEcon_

https://www.instagram.com/theblackecon_/

https://www.tben.co.uk/

Fadekemi writes for...

Stears Business: https://republic.com.ng/author/f-abiru/

Republic: https://republic.com.ng/author/f-abiru/

Articles on Black representation and diversity in economics:

https://qz.com/1492283/economics-has-a-crisis-of-diversity/

https://www.newsweek.com/economists-silence-racism-100-years-making-opinion-1509790

https://twitter.com/itsafronomics/status/1266714711913107456

https://www.niesr.ac.uk/blog/economics-after-slavery-and-george-floyd

https://fortune.com/2020/06/19/black-economists-fixing-systemic-racism-juneteenth/

https://www.res.org.uk/resources-page/economics-has-a-diversity-problem-starting-at-school-and-university-new-discovereconomics-campaign-launched.html

Also check out our podcast with Ifeoma Ozuma about her experience of discrimination, the importance of her work at Pinterest, and why diversity is so important to innovation and progress https://soundcloud.com/connectedanddisaffected/ep33-raj-final

Like what you hear?

Support us on Patreon!

www.patreon.com/connectedanddisaffected

Find us on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/C_and_D_Podcast/

Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/canddpodcast?lang=en

Join us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/

Subscribe on Spotify:

open.spotify.com/show/2xVDd0NSp6gsh6Ku2odlop

or find us on ITunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conn…ed/id1244893114

This week the boys are responding to a listener request, and reviewing Starmer's performance so far. Will he continue Corbynism? Is he Blair Mk.2? Is Labour guaranteed to win under his leadership? Or will he destroy Labour from the inside?

TL;DR - none of these things.

Featuring a potted history of Starmers political background, a Totally Reliable reddit poll run by Rowan, and a combination of our defences and concerns about Starmers leadership. As well as recognising how, at this point, there are many things we don't know.

Like what you hear?

Support us on Patreon!

https://www.patreon.com/connectedanddisaffected

Find us on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/C_and_D_Podcast/

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/canddpodcast?lang=en

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/

Subscribe on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/show/2xVDd0NSp6gsh6Ku2odlop

or find us on ITunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/connected-disaffected/id1244893114

We've spoken about tech platforms failing to police their content several times before, but every so often we like to highlight successful examples.

Back at the start of lockdown, we spoke about the amazing work being done at Pinterest to combat anti-vaxx misinformation. But it's since been revealed that the person spearheading all that work - Ifeoma Ozoma - was being underpaid and mistreated to the point that she was forced out of the company.

It is reasonable to talk about the complexity of online content and argue about regulatory oversight, but all too often we ignore the culture inside these companies.

Toxic culture in Big Tech companies is a genuine inhibitor to solving these problems and we need to pay attention to it because they are the only organisations that are able to solve it.

Follow Ifeoma here: https://twitter.com/IfeomaOzoma