Conference theme: Sustainability: Securing Regulation, Education and Technology for the Future
9th and 10th of April 2015
Mistaken Hate – Securing Regulation for the Future?
Barker, Kim
University of Wolverhampton Law School, UK
k.barker2@wlv.ac.uk
Keywords: Gamergate, control, users, regulation.
August 2014: The rise of the meaningless gamer and the Internet police. Tackling sexism. Tackling violence against women. The destruction of a genre and an industry by complaints. Or, as described by Valenti, Gamergate is loud, dangerous and a last grasp at cultural dominance by angry white men. Ironic then that the very thing that Gamergate grew into was that which it objected to. But whilst there are issues surrounding the attitudes of gamers & game developers towards women and sexism, there are bigger, more significant considerations for an industry that in recent years has seen several iterations of the same challenge. What are the regulatory challenges for the games industry in light of violence against women and Gamergate? What role should the law play in these spaces? Is classification of games sufficient? Or should there be some form of hybrid regulation of gaming and the gaming industry? Is it time that the industry moves beyond stereotypical attitudes, denials and fiascos, and considers sustainable and effective regulation? What should this regulation consist of? Should it extend to learning lessons from other game-related issues such as the Saarkesian episode from 2012, or should it stretch further than that and look at targeted abuse of women more broadly? Can gaming learn from social-media style prosecutions? Can a tech-industry learn from other tech- regulation? How should this industry be controlled? Can control be sustain able?
This paper will argue that one of the largest challenges facing multi-user platforms is that of control and as such regulation. The vast numbers of users and the multitude of opinions is something to be celebrated, yet this very diversity poses its own unique challenges. This paper will ad vocate for specific, sustainable regulation considering specific avenues of control. Fina lly, this paper will suggest that whilst gaming has proved to be a sustainable and adaptable industry, the controlling paradigms and framework within which it operates have failed to take into account shifting social paradigms. It is time for gaming regulation to change, and for that change to be a sustainable mode of control. Multi-user platforms are no longer the preserve of online fringes; but the fringe-control of such platforms appears to no longer be sustainable. Can multi-user platforms move beyond meaningless hate?
A new battlefront: the social media environment and insurance fraud investigation
Bates, John
Northumbria University, UK
john.bates@northumbria.ac.uk
Undetected fraudulent insurance claims in the United Kingdom
are estimated to cost society some £2.1 billion annually, and, some say,
add some £50 to each policyholder’s average annual insurance costs. The
problem is manifest in several aspects: exaggerated ‘first-party’
insurance claims by an individual comprehensive insurance policyholder
on their insurer, ‘malingering’ by a ‘third-party’ making a personal
injury damages claim following a policyholder’s alleged negligence,
through to organised networks of criminal enterprises fabricating
complex, intricate interconnected webs of fraudulent activities.
The social media environment has given liability insurers a new, and
increasingly potent, investigative weapon: a forensic analysis of an
insurance claimant’s social media footprint. Increasingly, evidence is
acquired from a public social media space inhabited by a claimant in a
much more cost-effective way than intrusive, expensive, video-based
surveillance evidence. Investigators probe into a space where a claimant
may expect a degree of privacy, and connected friends and contacts
within social networks are increasingly targeted to identify networks
and potential co-conspirators. The ethical parameters are often tested:
such as where investigators ‘friend’ a claimant or a member of their
network to acquire evidence for use in defending claims and civil
proceedings by the claimant.
This investigative, evidence-gathering process is situated in dealing
with the private law civil litigation claims process, initiated by the
allegedly fraudulent claimant. The private law regulation of the
acquisition, deployment and purpose of this evidence differs from the
conventional public regulatory and enforcement context, but shares some
objectives, and engages issues of data sharing with law enforcement
agencies. A recent trend has seen insurers increasingly ask civil courts
in compensation litigation to visit sanctions, including imprisonment
and fines, for civil contempt of court established against litigants
proved to be dishonest using social media evidence, contrasted with
their ‘statements of truth’ in documents filed by claimants in cases.
This has implications beyond the insurance claims process – the scope
for use in commercial litigation is yet to be explored.
What are the tensions existing between private law and public law
processes here? How well does the civil litigation process cope with
this phenomenon? How do aspects of the Jackson reforms to the funding
and costs of civil litigation affect behaviours? Do these investigation
techniques sit well with domestic professional regulation and ethical
behaviours? How do other jurisdictions deal with the issues? This paper
aims to explore some of these topical issues.
Turned on, Tuned In, but not Dropped Out: Enhancing the student experience with popular social media platforms
Berger, Dan and Wild, Charles
University of East Anglia, UK
Introduction:
The days of the static school noticeboard are over. Th
ere is no longer a need or desire for
small groups of students to hover around a central location
, discussing past happenings and
future advertised events printed onto dog-eared paper flyers, posted
onto a framed set of wall-
mounted cork floor tiles in the lobby of the admin office.
However, the need and desire to
stay plugged into the student social community has not disappeared, but
has been transformed
by modern developments in the way students interact with each other.
Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and
non-proprietary online blogs, are an inherent part of the modern
student’s life, and the apps which provide the link between these parent
sites and the student’s mobile phones, tablets and laptops
create an unprecedented
immediacy in the way that messages are communicated between users.
Until now, social media has been primarily used as a sepa
rate entity, albeit importantly, to the “at university/offline”
student experience – perhaps as a means of promoting special
events,
such as social activities or extra-curricular lectures,
or to raise general awareness for a type of
regular practice such as creating specialist groups for online
discussions of certain aspects
of university life, but we see this as a missed opportunity.
The problem is that university branded and run online social media
groups have tended to be
seen by students as a sort of
sub-class of online social interaction, with many students either
opting -out of receiving regular notifications from these groups–thereby
negating the benefits
of compiling a seemingly large membership–or allowing regular
notifications, but having
their effect minimised as students become inured to the constant stream
of information which
education providers deem potentially useful, but which the
student
acknowledges is not
personally targeted and therefore easy and beneficial to mentally
filter-out completely.
However, with some modification to the way that educational online
communities are created
and administered, it has been proved that the grey area between
total immersion and total
denial of university-led social media can be achieved, to
enhance learning, improve social
interaction between students in all programmes and years of study, and
create healthy, largely
unregulated communities aimed at improving the student experience.
The authors intend to explore the issues outlined above
and to seek to address the issue of
whether the student experience may be enhanced through the
directed use of popular social
media platforms. The proposed presentation, and paper, for
BILETA will draw on both
empirical data charting student engagement across a rang
e of activities and social media
platforms, and will also make use of student feedback via a
number of video clips from
interviews undertaken during the academic year.
Recommendations will be proposed in terms of:
(a)
the role which popular social media platforms may play
in the student experience;
(b)
whether University managed learning platforms in general (dra
wing on the experience
at this University) should seek to evolve beyond a function
al educational tool to
encompass aspects of community engagement for students;
and
(c)
the inherent parameters encountered with such social media
based activities.
