The Week That Was: IT and Media news week 46
Political online advertising is often controversial. Google has now announced that it will stop serving political advertising in the EU before EU’s new rules on political ads enter into force in October next year. Additionally, paid political promotions, where they qualify as political ads, will no longer be permitted on YouTube in the EU. Under the new rules, political ads must be clearly labelled as such and must indicate who paid for them, how much, to which elections or referendum they are linked.
The introduction of GenAI tools ChatGPT and image-generating led to nearly immediate decreases in jobs for online gig workers across job types, but particularly for automation-prone jobs. After the introduction of ChatGPT, there was a 21% decrease in the weekly number of posts in automation-prone jobs compared to manual-intensive jobs. Writing jobs were affected the most (30.37% decrease), followed by software, app, and web development (20.62%) and engineering (10.42%).
President-elect Donald Trump is known to dislike the media. He has called journalists “enemy of the people” and in his victory speech he talked about the media as “the enemy camp”. Media freedom organisations have now in statements shown they are worried about what will happen in a couple of months when Trump is in the oval office. “His election to a second term in office marks a dangerous moment for American journalism and global press freedom”, says Reporters without borders.
AI and generative AI consume more and more electricity and by 2027, 40% of existing AI data centres will be operationally constrained by lack of power. Data centres electricity consumption will increase 160% over the next two years, a forecast from market research firm Gartner claims. Big tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have recently announced that they are investing in nuclear power to get access to carbon-free electricity to meet the surging demand of electricity for data centres.
YouTube and Facebook are the most-widely used online platforms, according to a US fact sheet by Pew Research Center. On Facebook, the majority are women, 78% versus 61% men, while the gender balance on YouTube is a bit better but with a majority for men, 87% versus 83% for women.
“Women in the EU still continue to earn less than men, with the average gender pay gap in the EU standing at about 13%, for the third year in a row. This means that for every €1 a man earns, a woman makes €0.87”, the EU Commission says in a statement on the annual European Equal Pay Day on November 15.
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