From the Executive Director

Media Policy Watch

by Priscilla Genet

Arts Advocacy organization New Yorkers for Culture & Arts is currently raising funds to enact their mission of expanding infrastructure for Arts and Culture within New York. They are planning a variety of events including Candidate Forums in upcoming elections and a Mayoral Town Hall  where people running for mayor will be asked about their platform on culture and arts. NY4CA also seeks to aid arts organizations in New York by “[serving] as a sort of government affairs wing for these organizations that are too small, too strapped, and don’t have the capacity to have one” says Chante Seide, Director of Communications and Membership in the organization’s video Move Culture Forward for All New Yorkers.

Facebook’s algorithm is reportedly limiting the presence of left wing news sources, including sites like Mother Jones on their platform– according according to a report by The Wall Street Journal focusingwhich focuses on Facebook’s choice not to moderate statements from President Trump. These changes to the news-feed algorithm that went into place in 2017 have had a significant impact on Mother Jones readership and ability to produce revenue. The publisher reported last year that Facebook’s policy had caused “a loss of at least $600,000” in an 18 month period with far worse economic damage occurring to similar news sources. Mother Jones published an article last week detailing the extent to which their platform was specifically targeted by Facebook to ensure content moderation did not effect right-wing news sources stating “To be perfectly clear: Facebook used its monopolistic power to boost and suppress specific publishers’ content—the essence of every Big Brother fear about the platforms, and something Facebook and other companies have been strenuously denying for years.”

Last week, Poet and PEN Belarus member Dmitry Strotsev was arrested during a peaceful anti-government demonstration. PEN America’s Eurasia program director Polina Sadovskaya said in a statement from the organization saying “tThese relentless abductions and baseless charges against those who have exercised their right to free expression are unacceptable, and we urge the Belarusian government to cease these abuses. At the same time, the international community must press the Belarusian government to drop all charges against peaceful protestors and end the incessant oppression of its people.”  In a poem published in late august , Strotsev described his terror at consistent, violent, state repression  . The poem reads “we my wife and I are/ not revolutionaries,/ non-party and unarmed, an  armored and carnivorous/ dragon settled in our house most of all he loves our children ”