The Tories have caused quite a stir with their reinvigorated social media output – Guido hears CCHQ’s new head of digital Dan O’Neil is charging into the role with good results. A meme attacking Labour about illegal migration has now racked up 12 million views on Twitter. Some MPs aren’t too happy about it though, with Tobias Ellwood and Alicia Kearns calling for it to be deleted. Guido seems to remember a different initial reaction from Ellwood’s account…
Party Chairman Richard Holden told Guido last night that MPs were coming round to the meme after a frosty initial reaction. Meanwhile the new (legal) migration minister Tom Pursglove was asked about the meme this morning on both the Today programme and Sky News – to which he could dish out Tory attack lines against Labour. A clear win.
UPDATE: The tweet now has 16 million views.
The European Commission has published a report explaining how humour, satire, and memes are being used as online recruitment techniques by the alt-right. The 16-page document, released this week, goes to great lengths to describe what a meme is, which ones are popular, and what can be done to stop their vicious spread. It even kindly explains why “specialised knowledge” is required to “cope with the complex dynamics of humorous memes”…
To counter the weaponisation of meme culture, the report offers a few recommendations, including:
- Improving literacy
- Monitoring for any dangerous new memes
- Dispelling meme myths
- “Not taking the bait” of certain “exaggerated” material (specifics unforthcoming)
- Staying up to speed with online developments
Guido can point the EC towards a few useful resources…
The EU Parliament voted by a margin of 2:1 today to adopt Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive, a stringent copyright restriction that has the potential to ban memes. MEPs were made to vote again after having voted to reject it in July. Sound familiar?
Article 13 requires web companies to automatically filter out any copyrighted content, from songs to videos to even pictures. Say goodbye to your favourite gifs, movie stills, or other potentially copyrighted material on any social network.
Article 11 of the directive also is also deeply troubling for web freedom, in requiring internet companies to pay news outlets for hosting their content, potentially even just previews of articles.
This is just the latest anti-tech anti-consumer attack from the EU after they ludicrously fined Google billions of Euro’s earlier this year, and the year before.
This vote is not the end of the process, however. Every amendment passed today will have to go through behind-closed-doors negotiations between EU bureaucrats and EU member states. We can expect another vote on this ludicrous legislation in January 2019. Brexit can’t come soon enough…
Well this was almost inevitable…
