— Throwback Friday: The 15 days that upended Macron’s vision for European AI.
BEWARE, MEDIA CENSORS: Away from the AI Summit hype, Saturday marked the start of key provisions of the EU’s media freedom law, which will supposedly help rein in creeping state influence over newsrooms and foster pluralism — that is if the bloc is determined enough to stand up to its autocrats.
Just in: As of Saturday, national governments can no longer “interfere in or try to influence the editorial policies and editorial decisions.” Fingers crossed it sticks. The rest of the regulation, including more prescriptive rules, will kick off in August.
ERGA is dead, long live the Board: The European Regulators Group of Audiovisual Media Services, — or ERGA in short — has also now officially become the European Board for Media Services with added responsibilities like overseeing the application of new rules and mediating disputes between online platforms and media companies over undue takedowns of posts or restrictions. National watchdogs are meeting today for the constituting meeting.
“It’s much more than just a procedural step,” Democracy Commissioner Michael McGrath told Morning Tech. “The Media Board will play a key role in ensuring the independence and diversity of media across the European Union, which are pillars of a healthy democracy,” he added, underscoring “it is vital that media remain free, pluralistic, and protected” and citing the EU’s ongoing effort “to build the European Democracy Shield.”
Hopes are high: Media companies across Europe are counting on it to deliver. “One of the new important tasks of the board is, of course, the organization of the structured dialogue between big tech platforms, media service providers and civil society,” Thomas Bergmann, a senior policy advisor at the European association of public broadcasters (EBU), said, stressing it will be “really crucial” considering the increasingly “hostile approach” towards what some of these big platforms call “legacy media.”
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