Communications Law 2023

Question of the Week (Class 7) & Class 7 Poll: John Perry Barlow and “to regulate or not to regulate” social media?

Let me start this in a perhaps unusual place. John Perry Barlow passed away on February 7 2017 at the age of 70. He was many things and could easily be nominated for any list of the most interesting, charismatic, and thoughtful people in recent memory. He possessed instant street cred for having been a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, but there was much more. He was a visionary, spokesman, and poet for the early internet. Most of all he was a protector of of the web’s potential. He was a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and famously the author of “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”…

This week’s Question of The Week comes directly from Charlotte’s presentation last week, but Barlow’s life-work provides an interesting backdrop to answering it in the context of interests worth protecting. Perhaps this excerpt from Cindy Cohn’s announcement on the EFF’s website of Barlow’s passing captures it best:

“Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity’s problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: “I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls ‘turn-key totalitarianism.’”

So without further ado, here is the Question of the Week…

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

If you need to remind yourself of the various possibilities and their contexts, scroll down to the Week 6 slides and take a bit of time to reacquaint yourself with Charlotte’s

Jon

P.S. If you are interested in more on Barlow an excellent Obituary from The Guardian and Cindy Cohn’s announcement can both be found below…

Could AI Be the Future of Fake News and Product Reviews?

The following article aligns with our discussion of using AI technology to create deep fakes. However, this article identifies an experiment conducted by a group of University of Chicago researchers. The experiment involves using computer algorithms to create fake Yelp restaurant evaluations. The researchers used a machine-learning technique known as deep learning to analyze letter and word patterns used in millions of existing Yelp reviews. Usually when there are mass postings of fake reviews, for example when Hilary Clinton’s book was launched, websites are able to identify it. However, with the researchers’ use of AI, Yelp’s filtering software had difficulty spotting many of the fakes. Even human test subjects were unable to tell the difference between real and fake reviews.

The researchers wanted to conduct this experiment in order to see whether it was possible for individuals to make fake reviews on a mass level in order to impact people’s use of a product, book, restaurant or anything else. This interest displays how things focused on in the media like “fake news” or “deep fakes” really can impact the research and developments in the communication field.

For now, the approach to create fake critics remains to be “crowdturfing” where mass amounts of people are paid to comment on websites. “In crowdturfing online reviews, an attacker creates a project on the Mechanical Turk site and offers to pay large numbers of people to set up accounts on Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor or other sites and to then post reviews intended to either raise or sink a product or service’s money-making prospects”.

From here the researchers plan on looking at ways to detect fake news – currently its difficult to create fake news with AI because computers cannot generate the “human touch” in articles however if AI can create fake reviews – anything is possible.

ARTICLE: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-ai-be-the-future-of-fake-news-and-product-reviews/

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

DIGITAL

CREATIVITY

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

GAMES

Jon

Trudeau threatens Facebook with regulations over fake news problem

This article was interesting in light of what we’ve been discussing in class:

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/02/08/trudeau-to-facebook-fix-your-fake-news-problem-or-else.html

The article is just quoting “a source with knowledge” of some conversation between Trudeau and Sheryl Sandberg, and then goes on to say that neither Facebook or the PM’s office would comment on this, but putting aside the irony of an article about fake news that is essentially based on one anonymous source, it seems that the highest levels of Canadian government are at least considering some kind of social media regulation.

I also thought it was interesting that the title of the article references “stricter regulation” even though there doesn’t seem to be any sort of Canadian government regulation of Facebook at this point, particularly in regards to the kind of news content it allows on the site, and the article doesn’t go on to explain what, if anything, it is referencing with that wording in the title. It may have just been an oversight/error, or maybe they were thinking of regulations in a much broader sense, beyond the scope of communications law and site content, but it could also be that people just sometimes assume that there is some kind of regulation in place already in these situations, because it seems to strange to think that there wouldn’t be anything stopping these social media giants from profiting by basically turning a blind eye to propaganda.

Facebook and Google Tighten Grip Over US Digital Ad Market

In response to a recent post by Stephanie concerning findings on mobile carriers stifling certain apps and content, I am posting an article I recently read concerning Facebook and Google’s dominance on Ads. More often than not one will be searching something on googling and on Facebook an advertisement referring to the searched item will be present. The ability for Google and Facebook to do this is purely genius on their part and it connects back to the discussion we had on the ability for companies to increase their revenue by using their own users for feedback on what they want to watch/see and in this case assisting other companies to capitalize on that with ad space on these websites. Last year alone Google garnered (including YouTube) garnered $35.00 billion in total digital ad dollars in the US, up 18.9% over 2016!

AND if you are really paranoid about Facebook’s ability to look at your previous searches and reflect that in advertisements on their site ( EVEN THOUGH THEY ALLEGEDLY DENY DOING THIS) , the below article gives you a step by step guide on how to eliminate their ability to do this – logging out is not enough and there is no way to complete eliminate it but there are steps you can take to protect yourself.

https://lifehacker.com/5843969/facebook-is-tracking-your-every-move-on-the-web-heres-how-to-stop-it