Managing leagal risk

LIABILITY OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

More people today get their news and information from the internet rather than traditional sources such as television and newspapers. However, much of this information is deceptive or false. There’s a growing debate over the legal liability of social media platforms (SMPs) that provide this information. Consider the following with regard to advertising and fake stories:

Advertising drives social media platforms and the purchasers of ads provide a lucrative source of revenue to SMPs. It is the income from advertising that allows SMPs to offer the use of their services “free of charge” to millions of users. And the advertisers are happy to pay for the ads because they know they are effective at producing leads and sales. For example, just one major company, Proctor & Gamble, spends approximately $2.3 billion on online ads each year.

“Ads are the lifeblood of the internet, the source of funding for just about everything you read, watch and hear online. The digital ad business is in many ways a miracle machine — it corrals and transforms latent attention into real money that pays for many truly useful inventions, from search to instant translation to video hosting to global mapping. But the online ad machine is also a vast, opaque and dizzyingly complex contraption with underappreciated capacity for misuse — one that collects and constantly profiles data about our behavior, creates incentives to monetize our most private desires and frequently unleashes loopholes that the shadiest of people are only too happy to exploit.” Farhad Manjoo, Villain of Online Disrepute? The Ad Business, Seattle Times, (Feb. 4, 2018 at 5:00 pm, Updated Feb. 5, 2018 at 9:31 AM), https://www.seattletimes.com/business/villain-of-online-disrepute-the-ad-business/.

Not only does the online advertising pay for the free services of the SMPs, there is a perverse set of incentives at work in the online ad marketplace: false stories are more popular than true ones. Ads that appear on web pages displaying falsehoods attract more viewers, and are therefore more lucrative for the SMPs:

“The social media advertising market creates incentives for the spread of false stories because their wider diffusion makes them profitable. If platforms were to demote accounts or posts that disseminated false stories, using algorithms to weed out falsehoods, the financial incentives would presumably be reduced.” Sinan Aral, How Lies Spread Online, N.Y. Times (March 8, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/opinion/sunday/truth-lies-spread-online.html.

SMPs try to regulate this by terms of service (TOS) contracts between the SMPs and content providers. While SMPs have taken down some material which violates these terms of service agreements, the question arises whether these “contracts” are adequate in dealing with false and misleading information.

This issue is going in front of the US Supreme Court. See, US Supreme Court takes case on SMP liability for content

Your assignment is to LEAD.

L listen and learn

Who are the different stakeholders with regard to information and the internet. Consider what are the different perspectives of these shareholders. Who, if anyone, should be legally liable for false information on the internet?

E empathize and examine

Consider what are the different perspectives and motivations of these stakeholders. Are some perspectives more important than others? What do you think should be the overriding interests with regard to information and the internet?

A assess and analyze

Now, assess and analyze the following:

(1) Should SMPs be legally liable for false information posted on the internet if said information harms others?
(2) Should content providers be legally liable for false information posted on the internet if said information harms others?
(3) Do you believe that SMPs terms of service contracts are sufficient to control false information…or is the problem too wide spread and difficult to control with contracts. Should the terms of service contracts provide some liability protection for SMPs?
(4) Is this a situation where terms of service contracts won’t work and more government regulation is necessary?

D design and deliver

Your assignment is to analyze what you have discovered in the L-E-A-D phases of the problem then design and deliver a response to the questions under “Assess and Analyze.” You may need to conduct additional research to better evaluate legal liability, i.e. managing risk, with regard to who should be liable for information on the internet and how best to manage that liability.

Assignment Length. Please limit your analysis to 2-3 double spaced pages. (The page limit does not include citations)
Assignment Format. Please use Times New Roman, 12 point font, 1 inch margins, double spaced. Your assignment must either be a Word document or PDF because Canvas has problems processing other formats. It is your responsibility to ensure that your assignment has posted properly. Cite all course material (or other material) using APA format or the bluebook legal citation method for references.e paper and removed sentences and/or sections that are not value added.
Handing in the assignments. Post your paper to Canvas. Neither hard copies nor email copies will be accepted.

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