The gaps and inconsistencies in the Foreign Agent Registration Act are highly problematic for defending democracy
In this study, the authors map the legal work seven U.S. digital consultancies and public relations firms undertook across social media and digital platforms of behalf of four foreign governments. They find that these firms used a range of different strategies on social and digital media, very few of which featured legally required disclosures linking the content to their country of origin. Firms targeted journalists and other elites, but exactly how is not clear. Our most powerful findings regard what is absent. Our study reveals as much about the inconsistencies and inadequacies of the current FARA disclosure process and gaps in tech firms’ ad archives as it does about the content and strategies of the messages themselves. We conclude with a series of recommendations for technology firms and the Department of Justice for enforcing FARA regulations as they relate to social and digital content.
Audiences across platforms consume and create meanings about media in transgressive ways
Feminism can reflect the cultural moment, especially as media appropriate and use feminist messaging and agenda to various ends. Yet media can also push boundaries, exposing audiences to ideas they may not be familiar with and advancing public acceptance of concepts once considered taboo. Moreover, audiences are far from passive recipients, especially in the digital age. In Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism, Andrea L. Press and Francesca Tripodi focus on how audiences across platforms not only consume but also create meanings—sometimes quite transgressive meanings—in engaging with media content. If television shows such as Game of Thrones and Jersey Shore and dating apps such as Tinder are sites of persistent everyday sexism, then so, too, are they sites of what Press and Tripodi call "media-ready feminism." In developing a sociologically based conception of reception that encompasses media's progressive potential, as well as the processes of domestication through which audiences and users revert to more limited cultural schemas, Press and Tripodi make a vital contribution to gender and media studies, and help to illuminate the complexity of our current moment.
Copyright law is relational, as discovered through interviews with music therapists
This study offers new insights into (1) sharing health-related information on social media, (2) copyright gatekeeper motivations, and (3) the emotional injury for improper takedowns of online content. Through 18 in-depth interviews, we investigate music therapists’ copyright-comfort-zone. In music therapy, using patient-preferred music yields superior therapeutic results: The rub is that patient-preferred music is often copyrighted music. Therapists are comfortable using copyrighted music in private therapy sessions, but copyright concerns arise when recorded artifacts from therapy are shared online. Social media affordances permit sharing of therapeutic artifacts outside the private therapy bubble. Notwithstanding the desire and affordances to share therapeutic artifacts online, our results show that music therapists discourage social media sharing. Music therapists act as copyright gatekeepers not only to avoid legal liability, but also to forestall emotional harm to patients and families should these artifacts be subject to an online takedown notice. Our findings inform a more nuanced framework for understanding copyright’s influence on sharing digital artifacts.