Law Commons^™

Black-Boxing The Black Flag: Anonymous Sharing Platforms And Isis Content Distribution, Teodor E. Mitew, Ahmad Shehabat

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The study examines three anonymous sharing portals employed strategically by the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) to achieve its political ends. This study argues that anonymous sharing portals such as Sendvid.com, Justpast.it, and Dump.to have been instrumental in allowing individual jihadists to generate content, disseminate propaganda and communicate freely while routing around filtering practiced by popular social media networks. The study draws on Actor Network Theory (ANT) in examining the relationship between ISIS jihadists and the emergence of anonymous sharing portals. The study suggests that, even though used prior to the massive degrading operation across social media, anonymous …

The Natural Origins Of Content, Daniel D. Hutto, Glenda L. Satne

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

We review the current state of play in the game of naturalizing content and analyse reasons why each of the main proposals, when taken in isolation, is unsatisfactory. Our diagnosis is that if there is to be progress two fundamental changes are necessary. First, the point of the game needs to be reconceived in terms of explaining the natural origins of content. Second, the pivotal assumption that intentionality is always and everywhere contentful must be abandoned. Reviving and updating Haugeland’s baseball analogy in the light of these changes, we propose ways of redirecting the efforts of players on each base …

User Generated Content: Time To Consider The Ethical Conundrums As Well As The Opportunities, Julie N. Posetti

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Local police confirm there is an active shooter situation in a shopping centre... User-generated content is going to be the only source of content before your crews can get there. A producer identifies someone in the shopping centre. You can see that they have a good vantage point because they’ve already tweeted a photo of what looks like bodies on the ground. If verified this would be the first image from inside. How do you proceed?"

Juggling Ethical Dilemmas Of User-Generated Content In The Newsroom, Julie N. Posetti, J Sparks, A Matthews

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

That is one of the User Generated Content- (UGC) related ethical conundrums posed by a panel of experts at the International Newsroom Summit in Amsterdam last week. The panel, featuring the BBC's Steve Herrmann, AP's Fergus Bell and Google's Director of Communications for Europe, the Middle East and Africa Peter Barron, was moderated by UNHCR social media strategist Claire Wardle. Jessica Sparks and Alice Matthews explore the UGC issues that should have newsrooms ethically engaged.

Syntax Before Semantics, Structure Before Content (Book Review Of Carstairs-Mccarthy On Language-Origins), Daniel Hutto

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Carstairs-McCarthy's book sets out a bold proposal that constitutes an exciting challenge to the idea that the development of modern syntax was driven by the contentful divisions of language. Instead he posits a physiological cause in order to explain why the core aspects of modern syntax are as they are. It is a great virtue of the book that it carefully reviews a vast interdisciplinary literature encompassing biology, anthropology, neuroscience and the study of apes to support this startling hypothesis. Moreover, the author does a good job of raising doubts about the handful of views that would otherwise contradict it. …

Non-Conceptual Content And Objectivity, Daniel Hutto

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In recent times the question of whether or not there is such a thing as nonconceptual content has been the object of much serious attention. For analytical philosophers, the locus classicus of the view that there is such a phenomena is to be found in Evans remarks about perceptual experience in Varieties of Reference. He famously wrote:

In general, we may regard a perceptual experience as an informational state of the subject: it has a certain content -- the world is represented a certain way -- and hence it permits of a non-derivative classification as true or false. For an …