Social media and the Law – quiz

A high school seeks articles from its students for publication in the school blog. A student submits an article that makes certain negative allegations in respect of his or her parents. Staff responsible for vetting the material for inclusion in the blog assume the article was fictional and allow it to be published.

A t-shirt featuring black lettering that read “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?” went viral in 2017, after the singer Frank Ocean wore it at New York’s Panorama Festival. The shirt was traced to the online merchant Green Box Shop, which was soon swamped with 5,500 orders for the shirt. However, it was discovered that this quote was taken from a tweet without the permission of its creator.

A group of students in Kobe’s class have been invited to join the same WhatsApp group. At first, it was to chat about a soccer game, but the students enjoyed using WhatsApp. Soon it seemed like everyone was in the chat. Kobe wasn't asked, and a friend showed him a message posted in the group which said 'Kobe is a cry baby. No one let him in the chat.'

Machine learning algorithms could start to predict factors such as “political affiliation” or “leisure interests” simply by studying the tweets of someone’s friends. Often, they were able to do this with up to 95 percent accuracy. You can think of your friends as creating a “mirror image” of yourself – all a company or government entity needs to do is figure out who a person’s friends are, and it’s possible to predict how a person will act or behave.

A failure to take reasonable care to avoid causing injury or loss to another person, which may have been forseen.

A civil case where the claimant causes another to suffer loss or harm. Often resulting in an award of damages.

This occurs when a person publishes information about another person, group of people or organisation that damages their reputation or image.

Items of this sort are usually in the form of a photograph, artwork, videos, music, online post, etc.

When hurtful or untrue comments are directed towards someone using a social media platform.

Protection of personal information such as profile picture, photographs containing identifiable individuals, geo-location, video and audio content, as well as personal opinions. Further, social media content may also have embedded information – for example, images may have metadata which could potentially identify an individual.