The Australian wildfires, the Iran plane crash, climate change, Kobe’s death — it seems impossible to escape bad news. Media saturation can impact our socialization, mood, mental health and ability to interact, for better and for worse.
“It’s been a technological crisis for the last decade or so, and an advertising crisis, and now it’s sort of an existential crisis. If these things don’t exist – if the reporters and the institutions disappear from towns, campuses, cities, provinces – all of a sudden it’s just news darkness.” — Brett Popplewell, journalism professor at Carleton University.
“It’s a scary world … I’m just thankful to not have been a teenager in the world of the iPhone.” — Lynne McInally, clinical social worker, therapist and instructor at Humber College.
Zuckerberg’s sample presentation featured fake news stories the Facebook team plans to promote this election cycle, including headlines such as “Trudeau Pressured Wilson-Raybould to Help Maple Syrup Industry” and “Andrew Scheer Literally Ate A Baby”.
Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO) executive coordinator Vanessa Dorimain is alleged to have created a fake Facebook account under the name of Gabriella Auguste to boost the SFUO’s online image.
The SFUO had no right to delete these comments. After all, this is not their personal Facebook page where they can just block whoever disagrees with them (@JimWatsonOttawa). At the end of the day, the people they disagree with are still people they represent.
Pal noted that existing election laws and tools can be modified to encompass new issues emerging in the digital age.
Having such photos displayed publicly for everyone you know and care about to see is humiliating and emotionally damaging. Beyond this, photos posted online can exist in the ether forever, and impact a person’s quality of life and job prospects.
“With my own research, we’ve gone in and said we can’t just talk about the negative, we have to see what’s the positive, because if there’s nothing good about this, why are people doing it as much as they are? There’s obviously something good about it.”
The University of Ottawa received strong criticism following its Facebook post offering condolences to the victims of the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris that killed 129.