Watching Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Immersive Technology, Biometric Psychography, and the Law

Virtual reality and augmented reality present exceedingly complex privacy issues because of the enhanced user experience and reality-based models. Unlike the issues presented by traditional gaming and social media, immersive technology poses inherent risks, which our legal understanding of biometrics and online harassment is simply not prepared to address. This Article offers five important contributions to this emerging space. It begins by introducing a new area of legal and policy inquiry raised by immersive technology called “biometric psychography.” Second, it explains how immersive technology works to a legal audience and defines concepts that are essential to understanding the risks that the technology poses. Third, it analyzes the gaps in privacy law to address biometric psychography and other emerging challenges raised by immersive technology that most regulators and consumers incorrectly assume will be governed by existing law. Fourth, this Article sources firsthand interviews from early innovators and leading thinkers to highlight harassment and user experience risks posed by immersive technology. Finally, this Article compiles insights from each of these discussions to propose a framework that integrates privacy and human rights into the development of future immersive tech applications. It applies that framework to three specific scenarios and demonstrates how it can help navigate challenges, both old and new

Coca-Cola Curses: Hate Speech in a Post-Colonial Context

Hate speech is a contextual phenomenon. What offends or inflames in one context may differ from what incites violence in a different time, place, and cultural landscape. Theories of hate speech, especially Susan Benesch’s concept of “dangerous speech” (hateful speech that incites violence), have focused on the factors that cut across these paradigms. However, the existing scholarship is narrowly focused on situations of mass violence or societal unrest in America or Europe. This paper discusses how online hate speech may operate differently in a postcolonial context. While hate speech impacts all societies, the global South—Africa in particular—has been sorely understudied. I posit that in postcolonial circumstances, the interaction of multiple cultural contexts and social meanings form concurrent layers of interpretation that are often inaccessible to outsiders. This study expands the concept of online harms by examining the political, social, and cultural dimensions of data-intensive technologies. The paper’s theories are informed by fieldwork that local partners and I conducted in Kasese, Uganda in 2019–2020, focusing on social unrest and lethal violence in the region following the 2016 elections. The research, completed with assistance from the Berkeley Human Rights Clinic, included examining the background and circumstances of the conflict; investigating social media’s role in the conflict; designing a curriculum around hate speech and disinformation for Ugandan audiences; creating a community-sourced lexicon of hateful terms; and incorporating community-based feedback on proposed strategies for mitigating hate speech and disinformation. I begin this with a literature review of legal theory around hate speech, with a particular focus on Africa, and then turn to the legal context around hate speech and social media use in Uganda, examining how the social media landscape fueled past conflicts. Then I explain my Kasese fieldwork and the study’s methodology, before describing initial results. I follow with a discussion of applications to industry, specifically how hate speech is defined and treated by Meta’s Facebook, the dominant social media provider in Kasese. It progresses to a discussion of the implications of the study results and legal and policy recommendations for technology companies stemming from these findings. Importantly, I apply the research findings to expand existing scholarship by proposing a new sixth “hallmark of dangerous speech” to augment Benesch’s paradigm. Adding “calls for geographic exclusion” as a new qualifier for dangerous speech stems from the particular characteristics embodied by postcolonial hate speech. Examples from the Kasese study illustrate how this phenomenon upends platforms’ expectations of hate speech—which may not consider “Coca-Cola bottle” to be an epithet. The application of this new hallmark will create a more inclusive understanding of hate speech in localized contexts. This paper’s conclusions and questions may challenge platforms that must address hate speech and content moderation at a global scope and scale. It will examine the prevalence and role of social media platforms in Africa, and how these platforms have provided resources and engagement with civil society in these regions

Of Legal Rights and Moral Wrongs: A Case Study of Internet Defamation

On March 7, 2007, the Washington Post published a front-page report: Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web. It, and the subsequent follow-up coverage, details the story of female law students whose professional reputations may have been badly damaged by anonymous internet defamation. These women have also been subjected to sexual and racial harassment, including threats of sexual violence. I am one of those women

Postmodern Theory and Politics: perspectives on citizenship and social justice

In this paper we consider some contributions made by postmodern perspectives to theoretical and political questions of citizenship and social justice. Postmodern theory is often dismissed as a distraction from pressing questions of material inequality and economic and political exploitation. In the paper we distinguish between 'ludic' or 'spectral' postmodernisms and 'oppositional' or 'resistance' postmodernisms. We suggest that the latter provide theoretical resources for analysing the cultural construction of inequalities and struggles around social inclusion and exclusion. The paper is divided into three sections: in the first, three dominant narratives of modernization are addressed and their implications for concepts of citizenship and social inclusion noted; in the second, some postmodern challenges to these narratives are explored in order to disclose some of the key problems with modern paradigms of citizenship and social justice; in the third section we outline two postmodern approaches to the analysis of social struggles and their contributions to debates about citizenship. ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR; Copyright of Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract