Immediately after the 2016 election, many Americans discovered just how much fake news they were sharing via social media. And for about ten minutes, the term fake news had a specific and literal meaning; it referred to fabricated stories made to look like news, and which serve either as clickbait to generate ad revenue or as mischief to fan the ...
It was encouraging to see our most prominent millennial Member of Congress, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recognize the link between a healthy democracy a professional class of journalists. On Friday, presumably in response to the startling number of layoffs at BuzzFeed, @AOC tweeted this: True to form, Mike Masnick of Techdirt replied: It is ironically quaint at this point to see ...
Not long after I wrote a post suggesting there is little difference between naive human engagement and bot engagement on policy issues, a couple of things happened. One was the publication of a story by Max Read in New York Magazine reporting that a substantial (though hardly surprising) amount of material and people on the internet are fake. The other ...
(This post was first published as part of Copyright Alliance’s Secret History of Copyright Series) “This copyright bill is the doing as we would be done by.” — Walt Whitman, 1891— Upon passage of the international copyright law just about a year before his death, Walt Whitman’s comment (quoted in Part I) included this refrain of the Golden Rule, about ...
(This post was first published as part of Copyright Alliance’s Secret History of Copyright Series) “Publishers move without concert, harmony, or agreement. There is no law to regulate their rights, and they have none (which are respected) by courtesy. They print the same book, and the spirit of competition is such as to destroy all correctness, all taste, and all chance ...
