CommRN: Communication Law & Policy: North America (Topic)最新文献

{"title":"Ruinous Competition in News, the Postal Internet, and the Three Laws of Techno-Legal Change","authors":"Ramsi Woodcock","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3802884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3802884","url":null,"abstract":"Policymakers’ current approach to the problem of online misinformation, which revolves around defining the circumstances under which content platforms like Twitter and Facebook may be held liable for the speech of their users, fails to get at the root cause of the problem: the low cost of communication. The theory of monopolistic competition teaches that businesses respond to low-cost entry into their markets, and the cutthroat competition it creates, by differentiating their products, sometimes in legitimate ways, but sometimes through deceit. Misinformation on the Internet has the same source: speakers using deceit to compete for attention in a highly competitive speech market. The solution, as in all cases of ruinous competition, is to replace the falling technological barriers to market entry that have given rise to the excessive competition with new legal barriers to entry. \u0000 \u0000The way to create legal barriers to online speech is not to license speech, an approach that would violate the First Amendment, but rather to treat the Internet like a brick-and-mortar postal system. In the United States, the Postal Service enjoys a “letter-box monopoly:” the exclusive right to place mail in mailboxes. This exclusivity gives the Postal Service the power to charge a price—postage—for each communication delivered to an American mailbox. The U.S. Congress—or the Postal Service itself through reinterpretation of existing law—should give the Postal Service a letter-box monopoly on social media posting: the exclusive right to charge a fee for every Tweet, Facebook post, or other social media missive delivered in America. That would greatly increase the cost of being heard on the Internet, for as the number of a poster’s followers increases, the total cost of social media “postage” would increase as well, reducing competition and the incentive to misinform. Because the letter-box monopoly has survived constitutional scrutiny for two centuries, this approach would necessarily survive First Amendment scrutiny as well.","PeriodicalId":406829,"journal":{"name":"CommRN: Communication Law & Policy: North America (Topic)","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128999082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Throw the Book at Them: Why the FTC Needs to Get Tough with Influencers","authors":"Christopher Terry, Eliezer (Lee) Joseph Silberberg, S. Schmitz","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3775619","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3775619","url":null,"abstract":"The Federal Trade Commission is an administrative agency that has traditionally been aggressive when deploying its delegated authority. At the core of these actions is the FTC’s interpretive definition of deception as based upon a reasonable consumer standard. Specifically, the commission has regularly used § 5(a), in tandem with its interpretive definition of deception as a sword in a variety of contexts: bringing enforcement actions for deceptive advertising, endorsements and claim substantiation against a range of industries. These include successfully brought actions or obtained consent decrees in enforcement proceedings against powerful economic entities including Google and Facebook. <br><br>Yet, in one area, the FTC has been reluctant to engage in the hard tactics it regularly deploys in other areas. The Commission has struggled to employ a coherent enforcement strategy for deceptive practices by Social Media Influencers. The Commission has taken significant steps towards deception and disclosure enforcement for influencers, including publication of a set of guidelines for disclosure. However, despite a series of warning letters sent to high profile influencers in April of 2017, the Commission has not released a significant enforcement action - choosing instead to launch an inquiry in February 2020 to review the disclosure guidelines. <br><br>As empirical research demonstrates that consumers do not understand the nature of the influencer process, this paper argues that the FTC should employ a commitment to a strong enforcement stance. The FTC’s failure to “make an example” of high-profile influencers or to take a hard-line approach with influencers, as the Commission did with native advertising online, represents a parting with the manner with which the Commissions has traditionally enforced the deception standard in endorsement ads. This departure, this paper argues, is undermining the FTC’s consumer protections.","PeriodicalId":406829,"journal":{"name":"CommRN: Communication Law & Policy: North America (Topic)","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124616900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Regulating Bot Speech","authors":"Madeline Lamo, Ryan Calo","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3214572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3214572","url":null,"abstract":"We live in a world of artificial speakers with real impact. So-called “bots” foment political strife, skew online discourse, and manipulate the marketplace. Concerns over bot speech has led prominent figures in the world of technology to call for regulations in response to the unique threats bots pose. Recently, legislators have begun to heed these calls, drafting laws that would require online bots to clearly indicate that they are not human. This work is the first to consider how efforts to regulate bots might run afoul of the First Amendment. At first blush, requiring a bot to self-disclose raises little in the way of free speech concerns—it does not censor speech as such, nor does it unmask the identity of the person behind the automated account. However, a deeper analysis reveals several areas of First Amendment tension. Bot disclosure laws fit poorly with the state’s stated goals, risk unmasking anonymous speakers in the enforcement process, and create a scaffolding for censorship by private actors and other governments. Ultimately bots represent a diverse and emerging medium of speech. Their use for mischief should not overshadow their novel capacity to inform, entertain, and critique. We conclude by urging society to proceed with caution in regulating bots, lest we inadvertently curtail a new, unfolding form of expression.","PeriodicalId":406829,"journal":{"name":"CommRN: Communication Law & Policy: North America (Topic)","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132223034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Online Reviews: The Trouble with Trolls and a Role for Contract Law after the Consumer Review Fairness Act","authors":"Wayne R. Barnes","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3110208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3110208","url":null,"abstract":"The advent of the internet has brought innumerable innovations to our lives. Among the innovations is the meteoric rise in the volume of e-commerce conducted on the internet. Correspondingly, consumer-posted information about merchants, goods, and services has also become a rich source of information for consumers researching a purchase online. This information takes many forms, but a major category is the narrative review describing the purchase and experience. Such reviews are posted on websites such as Yelp, Amazon, and TripAdvisor, on apps, and on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The amount and volume of reviews has exploded in recent years, and these reviews have taken on great significance in the shopping experiences of millions of consumers. Indeed, positive reviews can greatly enhance a company’s profitability, while a negative review can have devastating effects. Some negative reviews are simply defamatory; some, while couched in opinion form, are extraordinarily and virulently negative. Such reviews are part of a larger online phenomenon known as the “online disinhibition effect,” or, more simply – internet trolls. Some companies had begun using non-disparagement clauses to contractually prohibit negative reviews. But the public reacted negatively to the attempt to completely ban reviews from being posted online, and in 2016 Congress enacted the Consumer Review Fairness Act which was intended to largely prohibit the use of clauses preventing such reviews. However, the concern of companies regarding the “troll-like” virulent reviews, often posted solely for vengeance purposes, remains valid. This Article posits that the Consumer Review Fairness Act still allows contract clauses which prohibit reviews that are defamatory, and also reviews that are “abusive.” Abusive reviews which should still be contractually prohibitable include the virulent, excessively negative “troll-like” reviews. (One important caveat—to date, California, Maryland, and Illinois have enacted their own state laws banning non-disparagement clauses, which do not presently contain the “abusive” exception as does the CRFA, and thus merchants subject to these laws cannot ban any consumer reviews of any type—troll or otherwise). Moreover, this Article further argues that the implied duty of good faith and fair dealing can be argued to prohibit such abusive reviews, regardless of the presence of an express clause banning reviews.","PeriodicalId":406829,"journal":{"name":"CommRN: Communication Law & Policy: North America (Topic)","volume":"106 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115581467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}