Media Law Blog

    Disinformation is a topic that many Americans are exposed to on a regular basis, even if they don't realize it. The election , the Corona Virus, vaccinations, and more incredibly important subjects are constantly targets of disinformation. Unfortunately, one of our largest sources for disinformation comes from the very top, the President of the United States of America. Trump is notorious for going to Twitter to spout lies in an attempt to sway the minds of his supporter base. It has gotten to the point where the platform regularly flags his tweets as disinformation. Some might argue this is social media getting into politics, but Twitter is doing their due diligence to try and maintain disinformation on their site and they can't be faulted for that especially when they are regularly hammered about the rampant disinformation on their site. Not all disinformation starts with Trump, but when people like him, who have massive supporter bases, lie, it is only a matter of ...

   For the second round of Each One Teach One I tackled the terrifying topic of Echo Chambers. An Echo Chamber is; 'a situation in which people only hear opinions of one type, or opinions that are similar to their own,' as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary . I call this terrifying because people can lodge themselves in their own echo chambers, hearing the same information or one-sided information constantly, until they believe it is the truth, the only reality. In our current politically charged environment, it is incredibly easy to get stuck on one side and ignore the other. The age of information should have made it harder for people to get trapped in echo chambers, but there is so much disinformation out there that people are easily tricked into believing one reality.     For example, the Anti-Vax movement started around a single study by Andrew Wakefield, a doctor who has since been excommunicated, and admitted that this study was false. In this study, he...

Privacy is a luxury that has a steadily growing premium on it. The internet collects more and more information every day, on you, your friends, your family, even your pets. All of it winds up on the internet and the information gets stored there forever. Web browsers are built to track your every move with features like cookies that cashe information for later use. Targeted ads are becoming increasingly more frequent and accurate. The second you go onto a website, that action is logged, the items you clicked on were logged, and now the ads you see from now on will begin to reflect what you looked at. There are options in most browsers to turn off data tracking and search engines like google allow you to turn off target ads. There are positives and negatives to doing this. The negative is that ads quickly become repetitive. The positive is that at least a fraction of your actions online are protected from advertisers.     Proxies are almost a necessity at this point. They ...

   Considering the implications of diffusion, when considered with ideas, is genuinely fascinating. There is almost a cycle with the diffusion of ideas through history. Good and bad ideas repeat generation to generation, and over time the mood of the public sways. It is impossible for people to settle on one core idea or concept. They may slowly diffuse through the crowd, the majority gradually taking on the idea, but there will always be a minority dissenting. Eventually, with time and new generations, that minority might become the majority, and the cycle would continue. The only way for it to end would be to have the global population reach a consensus on a single idea. This could happen but the likely hood is slim at best.  Take  gay relationships  for an example; hundreds of years ago in Rome, they accepted it as a general practice alongside normal relationships. This existed for hundreds of years as Rome continued to rule. Rome fell, though, and with it, ...

  Write about a technology that someone else did or that another team did.      I always knew that photography was one of the oldest mediums for preserving what we see but I never realized just how old that history was. The fact that the theory of Photography existed around 480bc and that five hundred years later around 990bc we'd be unraveling the mysteries of our eye is baffling. It took until 1803 for the preservation of photographs to begin but that doesn't diminish the thought experiments of the previous centuries.     Now, photographs are a staple of our social structure. We share them in person, online, comment on each other's photos, and even steal photos to make our own. A photo can literally say a thousand words with how much manipulation they can go through. Someone with a good working knowledge of Photoshop can totally twist an image to show something else. There's a point where laws about free speech will have to catch up with photograp...

Do a KEY POST based on your research for this EOTO project.   Mobile Games' Grab at Messaging    There's no denying that mobile games are an incredibly fun way to keep in touch with your friends. Find that perfect game you all enjoy and you'll be able to spend time together without risking your health. Player retention is an art. Mobile games are beginning to master that art as they begin to understand that the most important aspects of retention are social features.  Studies and thesis have been written about this topic , in both there's a clear trend towards social features retaining users the most. In Anna Narinen's thesis, she highlights two areas as most important; social media and social interaction.    She frames social interaction as features that allow players to interact—like; giving gifts, adding friends, and inviting them to play. Games don't have to be multiplayer-focused to add features like these. Candy Crush, a game that has no multiplayer,...