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Disinformation

Disinformation is deliberately misleading or inaccurate information designed to deceive the public and undermine people’s ability to make informed decisions. Although forged documents, government propaganda, deceptive advertising and other forms of disinformation are not new, current information technologies make the creation and spread of disinformation possible on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented impact.

Blog December 13, 2016

The Right to Be Forgotten

Every interaction by or about a person on the Internet, whether intended as public, semi-private, or private, is vulnerable to instant digital tattooing. For this reason, the right to be forgotten is emerging as a compelling companion to privacy. Privacy, like Article 19, features in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 12 states: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.
Blog November 30, 2016

Filter Bubbles and Fake News. How Free is our Individual Expression on the Internet?

A while back, I made the decision to take a longish vacation from all things social media. The weeks (months… years…) leading up to the last American election saw my various social feeds fill with bile, anger and surprisingly little fact-based discussion. It exhausted me to shovel all that stuff out of the way each day in order to get at the nuggets of book news and friend updates I was actually looking for.
Blog November 18, 2016

Hiding From the Bogeyman

My eight-year-old granddaughter told me last week that she was scared. When I asked her why, she told me that Donald Trump had been elected President of the United States, and that everyone in her class was scared too. And yes, she understood that we live in Canada and that Trump does not lead our country.  It seemed to her and other children that the bogeyman had escaped from their nightmares and had been elected to high office.