Search

The practice of ambush marketing continues to proliferate around mega sport events, notably during the Olympics. The ongoing commercial threat to official sponsors and event organizers threatens the sponsorship model on which the events rely. The current situation is further complicated by increased social media activity and engagement by competing athletes to engage not only with their followers on social media but also with endorser brands who may not always also be official sponsors of the event. The increasing role of Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter as a regulatory tool on social media to prevent ambush marketing is discussed as an additional brand protection measure beyond traditional legal enforcement. The commentary explores advances in recent scholarship related to ambush marketing and suggests directions for future research. Legal, policy, and practical implications for social media in sport are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, social media has become a major source of fake news, with disinformation used as a tool in manipulating public opinion and delegitimizing opposing voices. This study explores the influence of the content of social media on traditional media, and the proliferation of disinformation in the context of elections and accountability in Nigeria. Data were collected from 60 interviews and 18 focus group discussions with key stakeholders across Nigeria’s geo-political zones. The result shows the content of social media as shaping traditional media in addition to exacerbating pre-existing ethnic and religious tensions. The study recommends strengthening the positive elements of social media to weaken the threat posed by digital disinformation.

As legislators and platforms tackle the challenge of suppressing hate speech online, questions about its definition remain unresolved. In this review we discuss three issues: What are the main challenges encountered when defining hate speech? What alternatives are there for the definition of hate speech? What is the relationship between the nature and scope of the definition and its operationability? By tracing both efforts to regulate and to define hate speech in legal, paralegal, and tech platform contexts, we arrive at four possible modes of definition: teleological, pure consequentialist, formal, and consensus or relativist definitions. We suggest the need for a definition where hate speech encompasses those speech acts that tend towards certain ethically proscribed ends, which are destructive in terms of their consequences, and express certain ideas that are transgressions of specific ethical norms. SAGE-Journals-Accessible-Video-Player 10.1177/01968599221124309.M1 sj-vid-1-jci-10.1177_01968599221124309 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to question the dominance of human rights as the primary normative framework for European social media regulation, and academic research in this field. Analysing EU legislation and recent ECJ cases, it shows that issues like discriminatory content moderation, profiling, and promotion of stereotypes cannot adequately be addressed within a human rights framework. The centrality of individual rights in the EU legal regime not only fails to address collective issues, like platforms’ influence on culture and social norms, but cannot even offer effective, equal protection to individuals. In policy debates, the depoliticised and individualistic language of human rights can legitimise corporate activities and downplay important questions about the political economy of this privatised, highly-concentrated, advertiser-funded industry. The paper also considers interpretations of human rights as structural conditions or collective values, and argues that they cannot fully overcome the limitations discussed here. Given the entrenched role of fundamental rights in EU law, critics of social media cannot avoid relying on them. However, academics should also seek to develop more explicitly political critiques, based on alternative normative visions.

This paper aims to question the dominance of human rights as the primary normative framework for European social media regulation, and academic research in this field. Analysing EU legislation and recent ECJ cases, it shows that issues like discriminatory content moderation, profiling, and promotion of stereotypes cannot adequately be addressed within a human rights framework. The centrality of individual rights in the EU legal regime not only fails to address collective issues, like platforms' influence on culture and social norms, but cannot even offer effective, equal protection to individuals. In policy debates, the depoliticised and individualistic language of human rights can legitimise corporate activities and downplay important questions about the political economy of this privatised, highly-concentrated, advertiser-funded industry. The paper also considers interpretations of human rights as structural conditions or collective values, and argues that they cannot fully overcome the limitations discussed here. Given the entrenched role of fundamental rights in EU law, critics of social media cannot avoid relying on them. However, academics should also seek to develop more explicitly political critiques, based on alternative normative visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper critically assesses the regulation of social media recommendations in the EU's 2022 Digital Services Act (DSA), drawing on Sarah Banet-Weiser's economies of visibility theory. Banet-Weiser calls attention not only to injustices in the distribution of visibility between users, but also to the political implications of organising online media as an economy, in which individuals compete for visibility in a market structured by corporate platforms. DSA provisions on recommendations focus on enhancing user choice, protecting creators' market access, and encouraging technocratic responses to particular negative externalities, such as promotion of disinformation. Ultimately, then, the DSA aims to enhance the functioning of existing economies of visibility, rather than more fundamentally reforming a social media market in which visibility is allocated based on commercial value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing misuse of social media calls for an urgent move towards greater legal regulation to control the menace of fake news, hate speech and disinformation among democracies. Online interactions have undergone an evolution that threatens not only free speech, privacy, data protection, national security but democracy as a whole. The subject matter assumes significance, in a democracy like India, which has recently notified a new regulatory regime - Information Technology Rules, 2021, that has fundamentally changed the regulation of online content in India. This development warrants revisiting the prior regulatory regimes to analyse the new rules and guidelines and their impact on public sphere. The fact-finding review paper aims at mapping the evolution of laws governing online content in India. The study is based on reviewing existing laws, regulations, policies, research papers, media reports and articles. It also seeks to explore the linkages between the legislative regulatory gaps and regulatory framework covering rules and principles on instances of internet governance to find solutions for future developments. After critically examining new guidelines, the study found a case of overreaching provisions that dilute free speech and privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of the social media in the past decade has revolutionised communication, overshadowing the traditional ways of communication. Despite its convenience, social media is being used as a conduit for criminal activities. Notwithstanding its dark side, social media has also been utilised in enhancing national security. This study explores the various ways in which social media has been used to enhance national security in Zimbabwe, as well as evaluating the ways of overcoming the social media threats to national security. A total of 274 respondents from members of the public and the security arms of the state were invited to participate in the study through questionnaires and in-depth interviews. In relation to national security, findings reveal that social media is mainly used by the government and its agencies as a platform for explaining key government programmes and safety issues to citizens, as an open source intelligence platform, and for disaster awareness and management. Regulation and monitoring of social media activities was viewed as the most effective measure against social media-induced threats, followed by temporary blocking of social media sites. Notwithstanding the perceived effectiveness of these measures, respondents raised concerns over the human rights implications of the measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores global journalistic discussions of deepfake applications (audiovisual manipulating applications based on artificial intelligence (AI)) to understand the narratives constructed through global coverage, the regulatory actions associated with these offered narratives, and the functions such narratives might serve in global sociopolitical contexts. Through a qualitative–interpretive narrative analysis, this article shows how journalists frame deepfakes as a destabilizing platform that undermines a shared sense of social and political reality, enables the abuse and harassment of women online, and blurs the acceptable dichotomy between real and fake. This phenomenon is tied to discussions of dis/misinformation, manipulation, exploitation, and polarization in the media ecosystem these days. Based on these findings, the article then provides broader practical and theoretical insights about AI content regulation and ethics, accountability, and responsibility in digital culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Education Research (1680-6360) is the property of Angle Publishing Co., Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on advertising for online gambling products on social media platforms and examines advertising practices from the viewpoint of consumer fairness. It shows how online advertising is fundamentally different from traditional advertising in print media, offline media sites (such as billboards) and broadcasting. The growth of social media usage has created an opportunity for online advertising to exploit ways of advertising which are only beginning to be understood fully and receive regulatory attention, and which, therefore, may exploit current regulatory loopholes. In this article, we identify two major issues in respect of online advertising of online gambling: first the potential for unethical placing of gambling advertising targeted at vulnerable users, and secondly the opaque use of commercial advertising in user-generated content on social media platforms. Having identified these two problems of gambling advertising, we take stock of how the existing regulatory structures deal with gambling advertising online, with a view to making recommendations on how to tackle these problems. We argue that data protection law and gambling regulation have not yet satisfactorily addressed these issues and that a much more radical approach is needed, as set out in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This intervention considers changes to Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter during the 2016 Summer Games. It compares predictions made prior to the Games relating to legal issues in Olympic sponsorship and ambush marketing with what was observed on-site and what occurred online pertaining to legal issues in sponsorship at Rio 2016. Using examples from the United States and efforts by the USOC to enforce Rule 40, the author considers how Olympic officials have shifted their emphasis toward regulatory efforts aimed at athletes, such as through a relaxed Rule 40, rather than via traditional brand-protection efforts. The implications of this change are suggested in the context of the Olympic legal and business environment.

This intervention considers changes to Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter during the 2016 Summer Games. It compares predictions made prior to the Games relating to legal issues in Olympic sponsorship and ambush marketing with what was observed on-site and what occurred online pertaining to legal issues in sponsorship at Rio 2016. Using examples from the United States and efforts by the USOC to enforce Rule 40, the author considers how Olympic officials have shifted their emphasis toward regulatory efforts aimed at athletes, such as through a relaxed Rule 40, rather than via traditional brand-protection efforts. The implications of this change are suggested in the context of the Olympic legal and business environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germany's 2017 NetzDG law is an example of 'new school speech regulation' (Balkin, 2014), which restricts speech by coercing intermediaries into censoring users, rather than coercing speakers directly. It is the first such measure which specifically targets hate speech on social media, by requiring large platforms to operate complaints procedures which ensure illegal content is rapidly removed. Numerous other countries have since adopted similar regulations, indicating that states increasingly turn to new school speech regulation as a regulatory strategy to tackle hate speech on social media. This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of new school speech regulation in as a regulatory strategy to address online hate speech, taking NetzDG as a case study. A review of relevant empirical literature shows that many features of social media platforms actively promote or encourage hate speech. Key factors include algorithmic recommendations, which frequently promote hateful ideologies; social affordances which let users encourage or disseminate hate speech by others; anonymous, impersonal environments; and the absence of media 'gatekeepers'. In mandating faster content deletion, NetzDG only addresses the last of these, ignoring other relevant factors. Moreover, reliance on individual user complaints to trigger platforms' obligations means hate speech will often escape deletion. Interviews with relevant civil society organisations confirm these flaws of the NetzDG model. From their perspectives, NetzDG has had little impact on the prevalence or visibility of online hate speech, and its reporting mechanisms fail to help affected communities. NetzDG represents an incremental, narrow approach to a complex sociotechnical problem which requires more fundamental regulatory reform. In this regard, it shows the limitations of censorship-based new school speech regulation. Rules which assert state authority by prescribing censorship of narrowly-defined content categories are ill-suited to large-scale, networked, algorithmically-curated social media, where other governance mechanisms influence user behaviour more than content deletion. The paper advocates a more systemic and preventive regulatory approach. Platforms should be required to take public interest considerations into account in all design and governance processes, aiming to shape platform environments to actively discourage users from posting or viewing hate speech, rather than simply deleting it afterwards. • Germany's 2017 NetzDG law is taken as a case study of 'new school speech regulation'. • The paper demonstrates that this is not an effective way of regulating online hate speech. • Removing 'illegal content' ignores platform features which promote hate speech. • Advocates a more systemic and preventive approach to hate speech regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how governments can regulate the values of social media companies that themselves regulate disinformation spread on their own platforms. We use 'disinformation' to refer to motivated faking of news. We examine the effects that disinformation initiatives (many based on automated decision-making systems using Artificial Intelligence [AI] to cope with the scale of content being shared) have on freedom of expression, media pluralism and the exercise of democracy, from the wider lens of tackling illegal content online and concerns to request proactive (automated) measures of online intermediaries. We particularly focus on the responses of the member states and institutions of the European Union. In Section 1 , we argue that the apparent significance of the threat has led many governments to legislate despite this lack of evidence, with over 40 national laws to combat disinformation chronicled by March 2019. Which types of regulation are proposed, which actors are targeted, and who is making these regulations? Regulating fake news should not fall solely on national governments or supranational bodies like the European Union. Neither should the companies be responsible for regulating themselves. Instead, we favour co-regulation. Co-regulation means that the companies develop – individually or collectively – mechanisms to regulate their own users, which in turn must be approved by democratically legitimate state regulators or legislatures, who also monitor their effectiveness. In Section 2 , we explain the current EU use of Codes of Conduct. In Section 3 , we then explain the relatively novel idea that social media content regulation, and specifically disinformation, can be dealt with by deploying AI at massive scale. It is necessary to deal with this technological issue in order to explain the wider content of co-regulatory policy options, which we explain and for which we argue in Section 4. In Section 5 we explain what this means for technology regulation generally, and the socio-economic calculus in this policy field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]