I think that one of the biggest problems for our generation is the lack of privacy that we are all so accustomed to. Since we have lived with this dilemma for our whole lives, it doesn’t necessarily seem like a big deal that we’re constantly in everyone’s business. However, this does become a problem when the news has this same mentality; this was one of the major things that we learned this week.

This week we watched “Boston”, an episode of The Newsroom, which really helped put the dangers of social media into perspective, especially because this was a real event. In the episode, we see how the spread of information can be both helpful and harmful. Of course the spread of the information would have been extremely helpful if they were the correct suspects. However, the spread of false accusations was extremely harmful to the people who were affected as a result.

We act like this is a crazy occurrence, but I see this happen everyday. Everyone places so much importance on being the first to report something that we lose the importance of accuracy. Whether it’s top news or info about a celebrity’s actions, we are constantly getting false or partially false information. Not only do we spread misinformation but propaganda or the spread of terrorist or hate groups can be fueled by social media. This is only natural and probably for the most part unavoidable. As we can see from the article “Social Media Networks Are the Handmaiden to Dangerous Propaganda”, social media can help pass information and propaganda for groups who mean to do harm to others. I think that the best way to prevent this type of issue is education. People need to know when they’re seeing something threatening and know when to report it, as the halt of these types of pages and posts is critical in it’s early stages. We have already seen how fast this media can spread.

Another concept we talked about this week was revenge porn. Although it may not have be necessarily for revenge, I can bet that almost half of girls have dealt with something of this sort at least once in their lives. That’s why this is such a striking issue; it happens all of the time, and yet, the law still hasn’t figured out who to blame. We see this in the story about Katie Hill; although she fell victim to revenge porn, she ended up losing her career because of it. This is the same concept that Amy Adele Hasinoff, author of sexting panic, is fighting for. Although she focuses on sexting in the book, she is getting at the same theme. Privacy is important, and just as people can become immersed in legal trouble for defamation, they should be given the same punishment for ruining someone’s life over sexual content. Because these cases are so hard to get justice for, too many of them go unpunished or unnoticed entirely.

Here’s my question for the week: How do you think laws should be changed to fight issues like revenge porn and hate group propaganda?

The Weekly News

“Wrong turn leads to postal carrier’s arrest; mail found in car included absentees“

https://buffalonews.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/wrong-turn-leads-to-postal-carriers-arrest-mail-found-in-car-included-absentees/article_3834d150-1f6f-11eb-94be-97bbd829af9d.html

This story is about voter fraud, which does indeed happen, but probably not at the rate that Trump would like us to think it does.