I am looking forward to beginning work in the Council of Europe’s new Expert Committee on Media Regulators in a Platform-Based Environment. There are three reasons I think this is important.
First, with the other independent expert members, I hope we can ensure that we can help base the committee’s work on research. Policy is necessarily political, but it is also about evidence, and here independent experts can help.
Second, media regulators are typically set up for a mass media environment, but today have to do their important work in a platform-dominated environment. I hope we in the committee can offer ideas for how to evolve regulators’ role, remit, and resources to the media environment we have, rather than the one we had.
Third, the Expert Committee’s work is under the aegis of the CoE Division in charge for work on freedom of expression and media freedom. This is particularly important in a time of democratic backsliding and attacks on fundamental rights, as media regulators are unfortunately often one of the independent institutions that would-be autocrats seek to subvert and instrumentalize in pursuit of media capture and worse.
I hope our work in the committee can consider both the different kinds of good that media regulators can do, help ensure they have tools for the present and the future, not just the past, and consider how to limit the harm they can be used to do.
Looking forward to working with Rowena Burke Audun Aagre Stephanie Comey Tanja Kerševan Michèle Ledger Krisztina Rozgonyi Maria Luisa Stasi and everyone else involved in this over the next two years.
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