Canadian Lawyer 4Students

* Q& A The course has three main objectives. How will each be achieved? 1. The first objective is really to engage the students in a critical, legal analysis of some of the issues involving social media —  things like privacy, anonymity, narcissism and legal culture, human rights, and whistleblowing. To that end we engage them in a critical analysis of a broad, diverse range of materials. It includes things like case studies involving individuals who have had some tragic encounters with social media; it involves listening to recordings of debates between lawyers and members of the legal community involving interesting issues such as anonymity versus a real-name policy; it involves looking at articles in law journals, scholarly books, and engaging in a discussion of all of those materials. 2. Another objective is to look at some of the benefits of social media in the sense of things like social activism. We looked at some readings by people like Malcolm Gladwell who talked about the strong tie versus the weak tie, and that social activism using social media involves weak ties sometimes with people you haven't met or barely know, as opposed to the strong ties which occurred in social activism in the 1960s when people went with their college roommates and people who they knew and they put themselves in harm's way in demonstrations against segregation in the deep south, for example. In the Middle East where you have the Arab Spring, social media was used very effectively to mobilize people and a lot of people did end up putting themselves in harm's way as a result of mobilization through social media. So there are different schools of thought on whether social media is effective for social activism or not, or whether it just makes people feel better that they've given some token effort into being a social activist without putting themselves in harm's way. We looked at some cases involving people who participated in the Occupy movement in the United States last year, particularly the ability of the government to obtain copies of people's Twitter feeds and the metadata behind the Twitter feeds, which actually enables the police to pinpoint peo12 fall 2013 CANADIAN ple's locations at the time of their tweet. 3. The third objective of the course is to look at proposals for reform as well as potential self-help measures that students can engage in to prevent themselves from becoming victims of some unintended misuse of social media. Information in the sense of embarrassing photographs which are put on in a moment of haste tend to stay on the Internet . . . once it's out there, it's out there. So through some cautionary tales of people who've posted material as youths or young adults that they would later regret, trying to foster a culture amongst the students that they should really be careful what they post. And then looking at some proposals for reform that have been put forward by various legal scholars. So there are some interesting technological solutions and various other proposals for reform that we examined. Why is it important to teach students about the law and ethics of social media? [Students] should be concerned about the increasing prevalence of the role of social media in society. No matter whether they end up as advocates, decision-makers, or policy-makers, they really need to be aware of the issues involving social media because it's becoming so diffuse and such an integral part of business, our social relations, our economic relations, and our personal relations. We discussed in the class how there is a problem amongst the judiciary, particularly that they're not up to speed on all the various ins and outs of social media. Of course, as young people, students are more up to speed on that but to supplement the knowledge that they already have, they really need to become familiarized with some of the legal issues surrounding it as they move forward into these roles in society so that they can deal with them effectively. What kinds of legal issues have arisen recently as a result of social media? There have been a lot of tragic issues over the past six months or so involving the deaths of various young people who were engaged in social media issues [that] led to their demise, often through suicide. There's the cyber stalking case of a young woman L a w y e r 4 students in high school in Nova Scotia, who had pictures of her posted online and was bullied so severely she took her own life. Issues involving misidentification of people — there was a student at Boston University who was wrongly identified as one of the bombers in the Boston Marathon bombing. He was found dead floating in the river there. They haven't figured out what happened to him, presumably it was a suicide. So social media issues can result in very tragic circumstances and people need to be aware not only to protect themselves, but to try and do something to prevent these things from happening to other people in the future. There are also issues surrounding government surveillance programs. We have the problem that's been revealed through the leaks by Edward Snowden, who was an employee of a contractor working for the National Security Agency in the United States, that social media companies are being leaned on by the government to divulge the content of all these posts, which we presumably thought were none of the government's business. What kinds of issues do you predict will arise in the future? One of the things I think that we should really be looking at as potentially a gamechanging technology is this whole issue of wearable computers. Google is coming out with something called Google Glass at the end of 2013 or early 2014. Basically it's a wearable computer, which looks just like an ordinary pair of eyeglasses except for the fact it has a little area attached to one of the lenses where it has a small screen that you can look at and actually surf the Internet while you're talking to somebody. There are some dangers with that in that you could have facial recognition software; you could pass people on the street and instantly find out their background . . . which is very much an invasion of privacy. The other thing is that if we are wearing something called Google Glass — potentially every waking hour of the day — we're beginning to live inside these virtual worlds created by these corporations. So wherever we go when we're awake, we have ads coming at us through these glasses or various feeds

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