Follow the Rechtsstaat Folge 76

Niko Härting has the great pleasure of talking to Jeff Jarvis, an
American journalist, associate professor, public speaker and former
television critic. Jeff Jarvis has written numerous books with his
latest one to be published this fall – “The Web We Weave - Why We
Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral
Panic”. Jeff Jarvis is criticizing the Opinion that the European
Data Protection Board (EBDP) recently published on the “Pay or
Okay” model that Meta has introduced for Facebook and Instagram.
The EBDP is arguing that users need to be given the option of using
the platforms free of charge and without targeted advertising in
order to be GDPR compliant. At the end of the day, the stance that
the EBDP takes might endanger the lately established “pure”
alternatives that media sites are offering for users who are
willing to pay a subscription fee for ad-free news articles. “It
takes a bunch of hyperboles to make this argument”- Jeff Jarvis
explains why targeted advertising may be regarded as creepy but
can, by no means, be equated with “surveillance”. In strong words,
Jarvis criticizes the “moral panic” that tends to blame the
internet for all kinds of evils as well as the tendency to
interpret the GDPR “in an overblown way”. Attention needs to be
paid to actual harm: What is the actual harm for users when they
are targeted with ads? What, on the other side, would be the harm
for public discourse if media companies and platforms were not able
to finance free content by targeted ads? In more general terms,
Niko Härting and Jeff Jarvis also talk about content moderation and
the trend of making the large US platforms more and more
responsible for content published on the platforms. In a democracy,
it is problematic if it is up to private companies and not up to
the justice system to police content. There clearly is a power
issue as far as the US “internet giants” are concerned. But is this
really what privacy and the GDPR are about?