Law Commons^™

Subverting Democracy To Save Democracy: Canada’S Extra-Constitutional Approaches To Battling “Fake News”, Michael Karanicolas

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Nearly a decade after the first Twitter and Facebook revolutions, the early narratives pointing to social media as a great agent of democratization1 have given way to a more nuanced understanding of the impact of the Internet on our political discourse. While there is no question that Internet access provides tremendous expressive benefits, scholars are increasingly questioning whether this information diet is ultimately healthy for society. An analogy to sugars, fats and salts has emerged, where just as an appetite for rich foods served our species well when resources were scarce, but have become a liability in an age of …

A Dangerous Concoction: Pharmaceutical Marketing, Cognitive Biases, And First Amendment Overprotection, Cynthia M. Ho

Indiana Law Journal

Is more information always better? First Amendment commercial speech jurisprudence takes this as a given. However, when information is only available from a self-interested and marketing-savvy pharmaceutical company, more information may simply lead to more misinformation. Notably, doctors are also misled. This can result in public health harms when companies are promoting unapproved uses of prescription drugs that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved for other purposes—commonly referred to as “off-label” uses. Contrary to judicial presumptions, as well as the presumptions of some doctors and scholars, doctors are not sophisticated enough to always discern what is true versus …

Information Mischief Under The Trump Administration, Nathan Cortez

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The Trump administration has used government information in more cynical ways than its predecessors. For example, it has removed certain information from the public domain, scrubbed certain terminology from government web sites, censored scientists, manipulated public data, and used “transparency” initiatives as a pretext for anti-regulatory policies, particularly environmental policy. This article attempts to tease out an emerging “information policy” for the Trump administration, explain how it departs from the information policies of predecessors, and evaluate the extent to which both legal and non-legal mechanisms might constrain executive discretion.

Facebook's Alternative Facts, Sarah C. Haan

Scholarly Articles

In this short essay, I argue that Facebook’s adoption of the alternative-facts frame potentially contributes to the divisiveness that has made social media misinformation a powerful digital tool. Facebook’s choice to present information as “facts” and “alternative facts” endorses a binary system in which all information can be divided between moral or tribal categories—“bad” versus “good” speech, as Sandberg put it in her testimony to Congress. As we will see, Facebook’s related-articles strategy adopts this binary construction, offering a both-sides News Feed that encourages users to view information as cleaving along natural moral or political divisions.

Prosecuting Vote Suppression By Misinformation, Chelsea Mihelich

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, concerns about the influence of “fake news” proliferated in the media. Questions abounded regarding the affect social media platforms may have had on the electorate. Election Day 2016 had many in the media pondering: “Did Social Media Ruin Election 2016?” and “Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?” Two years after the election, social science scholars were still studying the effect of voters’ consumption of fake news stories leading up to November 8. The current fascination in the U.S. regarding fake news and, relatedly, the role of social media as …

The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory Of Organised Social Media Manipulation, Samantha Bradshaw, Philip N. Howard

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Executive Summary

Over the past three years, we have monitored the global organization of social media manipulation by governments and political parties. Our 2019 report analyses the trends of computational propaganda and the evolving tools, capacities, strategies, and resources.

1. Evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns which have taken place in 70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28 countries in 2017. In each country, there is at least one political party or government agency using social media to shape public attitudes domestically.

2.Social media has become co-opted by many authoritarian regimes. In 26 countries, computational propaganda …