News Story

Accessing news content through the internet is an everyday activity for many people, but the regulations governing these platforms can feel technical and complicated.

With support from The Media School’s Center for International Media Law and Policy Studies, Noah Arjomand has produced an animated video series that simplifies these topics so they’re accessible for everyone.

“The idea is to show how all of these aren’t just abstract legal or technical engineering problems, but all of them relate really closely to issues that all of us care about or should care about — press freedom, the ability of producers of media to reach their audiences, the inequality in who has a voice online,” said Arjomand, a Mark Helmke postdoctoral scholar on global media, development and democracy in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

Arjomand’s series explains internet governance — the structure and regulation of the internet — and its impact on journalism. It addresses issues including Right to Be Forgotten laws, surveillance, traffic-blocking, zero-rating and algorithms.

Arjomand created the four-part video series for the National Endowment for Democracy’s Center for International Media Assistance, which works on issues related to press freedom and global media.

The animated videos are intended to educate people who don’t know much about these topics, including younger viewers.

“The idea for the series is to make these ideas accessible to a larger audience in a way that itself isn’t super jargon-y or complicated by illustrating through a series of concrete examples,” he said. “We have a fictional journalist and fictional activist who are trying to get out important stories, and they’re being stymied by the way that the internet in these invisible ways is constraining them.”

He also created two other animated explainer videos, one about media capture and one about journalism ethics, which he co-wrote with professor of practice Elaine Monaghan.

Monaghan has been working with Arjomand on the videos for over a year. She said she was interested in the project because of its international relevance and Arjomand’s goal of educating the general public about issues that can seem only relevant to journalists and academics.

“I’m somebody who’s really interested in international journalism, and there’s a very strong global component to this,” Monaghan said.

Associate professor Anthony Fargo, director of CIMLAPS, helped connect Monaghan and Arjomand. The institute is supporting Arjomand’s project through its Barbara Restle Press Law Project.

Part of CIMLAPS’s mission is to educate people about issues threatening press freedom, and Fargo said these videos help get that message to a broader audience.

“It can be very easy to sort of get yourself lost in an echo chamber where you’re talking to other people who already agree with you,” Fargo said. “So the idea here is to try to get the message out about what kind of things are challenging free expression or challenging media development more broadly that we don’t necessarily immediately think about.”

Communicating these challenges in a digestible way allows the public to understand what journalists, governments and internet companies are actually doing. Arjomand said the biggest takeaway from the series should be that these issues don’t have to be intimidating.

Issues surrounding press freedom and internet governance affect everyone throughout the world, and understanding them can empower ordinary citizens, Monaghan said.

“It’s very much intended for an international audience, and that’s what makes them so powerful,” Monaghan said. “Noah’s really trying to connect the dots about issues that affect all of us.”