21525 - SCTE Broadband May2022 COMPLETE

18 Vol. 44 No. 2 - May 2022 Issue industry news In response to the horrific invasion of Ukraine and in support of those affected, the UK’s largest mobile operators, Virgin Media o2, Three, Vodafone and EE quickly pledged to remove charges for data use in Ukraine and credit charges for calls and texts to and from Ukraine and the UK. The unprecedented announcement is echoed to a large extent by telecoms providers all over Europe. Virgin Media o2 are offering these measures, for example: n These measures apply to customers on O2 Pay Monthly, O2 Pay as you Go, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Media O2 Business customers, Virgin Media home phone customers, and giffgaff customers n Texts and data use, and all calls to and from the Ukraine, will be covered n This will cover the period 21 Feb until 31 March 2022, but we will keep this under review n Charges will be credited back to customers automatically – they do not need to do anything. We will be texting customers to confirm what is happening. The reaction to the news continues to be felt industry-wide. Ofcom has revoked Russia Today’s licence to broadcast in the UK, with immediate effect, along with other territories in Western Europe which are no longer broadcasting RT content. Ofcom were bullish, saying that the news came “amid 29 ongoing investigations by Ofcom into the due impartiality of RT’s news and current affairs coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We consider the volume and potentially serious nature of the issues raised within such a short period to be of great concern – especially given RT’s compliance history, which has seen the channel fined £200,000 for previous impartiality breaches.” Ofcom Chief Executive Dame Melanie Dawes said, “Freedom of expression is something we guard fiercely in this country, and the bar for action on broadcasters is rightly set very high. Following an independent regulatory process, we have today found that RT is not fit and proper to hold a licence in the UK. As a result we have revoked RT’s UK broadcasting licence.” Ofcom’s move is just one of up to 1000 sanctions on Russian individuals and businesses by the UK alone, a growing list intended to cripple the Russian Federation economically. At the time of writing sanctions have just been targeted at RT’s Managing Director Alexey Nikolov, Anton Anisimov, editor- in-chief at Sputnik, as well as Sergey Brilev, news anchor at Rossiya Television and Radio Network. Ukrainian invasion Weaponised tech is also featuring in this war like no other before it. On March 2 a passable deepfake video of a rather wooden President Zelensky was uploaded to a hacked Ukrainian news website, calling on his soldiers to lay down their arms. This spread to social media immediately but was quickly debunked by Zelensky himself. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and its parent company Meta immediately responded and removed the content from its platforms. A reminder just how easily technology can be harnessed to spread damaging misinformation, and that deepfake technology is in its infancy. As this technology improves and is adopted more widely, the opportunity for deepfakes to subvert world events and narratives in future is worrying and enormous. Deepfake technology

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