Media and the law: the Film and Publications Board Amendment Act
Online content producers and influencers are united against the Films and Publications Amendment Act (FPAA) which comes into force following a lengthy process of consultations after it was announced in 2016.
The revision of the Act demands that online content producers submit their content to the Film & Publications Board (FPB) for classification, to determine whether such expression is permitted online or not. Content producers believe the revision of the Act is intended to limit their freedom of expression and censor their content.
Right2Know presents the background, contextualising how, ‘with the coming of democracy, the apartheid system of censorship was dismantled [and] in the 1990s, the Films and Publications Act (FPA) was passed and the FPB … instituted as a statutory body’. But ‘the FPB replaced the apartheid censors’.
‘Its duty has been to classify, not censor; to inform people of the content of films and certain other publications (though “publications” is vaguely defined) under the slogan “we inform, you choose”.’
Then came the shift, as Right2Know explains.
‘The FPB’s tasks used to be quite straightforward and it was concerned with traditional media, especially applying age restrictions on films and videos. But with the expansion of Internet connectivity in South Africa, the FPB’s role became a lot less certain.
‘Suddenly, we were downloading and uploading all sorts of content, watching movies and videos from around the world on our cellphones, generating our own content and streaming it on social media and blogs and so forth.
‘For South Africans who can afford to be connected to the Internet, the amount of content that is available at their fingertips is limitless. Take YouTube for example: hundreds of hours of video are uploaded every minute. And with digital convergence – the movement of content onto new platforms and ability to interact with the same multimedia content on different devices – the ability of the FPB to classify and enforce its regulatory power has been undermined further.
‘In response, the FPB wants to give itself greater authority to regulate online content.’
Read the related news report in news24 here.
Read the original Films and Publications Amendment Bill here.
Read a summary of the most important features of the Bill here.
Right2Know unpacked all the details and the controversy dating back to its first iteration in 2016, here.
Read the Press Council’s presentation about to Bill to the Portfolio Committee on Communications, here.
Read the formal written submissions on the Bill, as invited by Parliament, by our partners Media Monitoring Africa and SOS: Support Public Broadcasting Coalition, here.
Read the Report of the Portfolio Committee on Communications on the public hearings on the Films and Publications Amendment Bill, in June 2017, here.
Read an advisory note, which includes the Films and Publications Amendment Act, from ALT Advisory here.
Read the Film and Publications Board’s FAQs on the Act, here.
A view from Webber Wentzel Attorneys can be read here, and a view from Bowmans Attorneys can be read here.
- This post was compiled by Janet Smith, adjudicator at the Press Council
