While UK political leaders try to attract our attention, Kurt Mahlburg has a useful Mercatornet piece to remind us of our increasingly threadbare democratic options. We have no way to vote for political oversight of the global background to UK political games, global backgrounds such as GARM for example. We know it already, but the piece is worth reading as a reminder.
Meet GARM, the World Economic Forum’s Swiss army knife for woke-ifying Planet Earth
The Global Alliance for Responsible Media is attacking the problem of ‘harmful content’
The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) dubs itself “a cross-industry initiative established by the World Federation of Advertisers to address the challenge of harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising”.
By “harmful content”, GARM means views about climate change, gender, sexuality or race that are more than five minutes old and happen to be grounded in reality.
GARM has created standards that “limit or entirely demonetize platforms that contain ‘hate speech’ on ‘gender identity,’” and “insensitive… treatment of debated social issues”.
Liking what it saw, the World Economic Forum gobbled up GARM as a “flagship project” in its “Platform For Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture” just months after the project’s launch in 2019.
3 comments:
Seriously worrying, given that corporations and brands have far more influence over most young people than state education.
I checked out their website, and it seems to be the standard protection racket:
"Members support the GARM operations via an annual membership fee and are expected to appoint representatives to be part of the GARM community. We also collaborate with relevant industry association members to ensure as many people as possible understand GARM’s work."
Stonewall do the same. Big companies are approached, and asked if they want to join. For a fee. The alternative is that they don't get the Stonewall/GARM/Investors in People/etc. kitemark; which means that they can be accused of being homophobic/transphobic/uncaring/etc., which might damage the business. Even my son's hard-nosed private equity firm is frightened of them. They took on a dozy useless black trainee and made a glossy video about his defeating racism, etc., rather than be accused of not caring about BLM etc. In the long run, it's cheaper. "Nice little business you've got here...be a shame if anyone broke it..."
Luckily, I hardly ever watch adverts, so all this goes 'whooosh' over my head!
If I ever do see an ad which disagrees with my personal philosophy, I automatically cross those products off my list,and forget they ever existed!
Much easier that way!
Sam - a few years ago someone accused Greenpeace of having become a protection racket - support us or we'll visit your business for a demonstration. Government funding of Oxfam could be done for a similar if less overt reason, to dilute any criticism.
Scrobs - although we don't watch much tv, we just click the sound off when the ads come on.
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