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Daily Archives: May 15, 2019

Civil Liability for Cyberbullying

Perry, Ronen, Civil Liability for Cyberbullying (April 12, 2019). UC Irvine Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3371020 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3371020

“Cyberbullying has become a notorious epidemic, culminating in widely publicized suicides. Whether a new and distinct problem or an old one in a new guise, the technological setting has undoubtedly generated new challenges and, at the same time, new opportunities for legal response. Regrettably, while delegation of power to educational institutions and criminalization of cyber-misconduct are relatively common, at least in public discourse, the potential impact of civil liability has been downplayed. This Article puts the underexplored regulatory tool under the spotlight. It provides systematic legal and economic analyses of civil liability for cyberbullying, based on a trichotomy of potential defendants—primary wrongdoers, real-life supervisors (parents, schools), and virtual supervisors (mostly online platform operators).

Ultimately, the Article lays the foundations for an efficiency-oriented model which integrates technological features to reduce supervisors’ information costs. In order to incentivize parents to reasonably use advanced surveillance applications, the proposed model imposes liability when failure to employ such tools results in juvenile cyber-wrongdoing, in addition to standard liability for not taking reasonable precautions upon learning about the risk. The model also imposes liability on schools for cyberbullying through school devices if they failed to: (1) enforce reliable identification of users, (2) employ advanced surveillance tools, or (3) take reasonable measures to prevent harm upon notification of possible misconduct. Finally, the model holds a virtual supervisor liable if the victim has insufficient information to identify the wrongdoer, the victim gave notice of the complaint, and the virtual supervisor did not properly respond.”

Auditing for Bias in Resume Search Engines

Investigating the Impact of Gender on Rank in Resume by Le Chen, Ruijun Ma, Anikó Hannák and Christo Wilson “In this work we investigate gender-based inequalities in the context of resume search engines, which are tools that allow recruiters to proactively search for candidates based on keywords and filters. If these ranking algorithms take demographic features into account… Continue Reading

Bristol academic cracks Voynich code, solving century-old mystery of medieval text

Phys.org: “A University of Bristol academic has succeeded where countless cryptographers, linguistics scholars and computer programs have failed—by cracking the code of the ‘world’s most mysterious text’, the Voynich manuscript. Although the purpose and meaning of the manuscript had eluded scholars for over a century, it took Research Associate Dr. Gerard Cheshire two weeks, using… Continue Reading

News Dispatches from AP from 1915 to 1930 Now Online

Library of Congress – “Historical news reports and breaking news bulletins published by the Washington bureau of The Associated Press from 1915 to 1930, documenting a full chronology of world and national events, have been digitized and are now available online from the Library of Congress. The collection includes news dispatches from key moments in… Continue Reading

Behind Twitter’s Plan To Get People To Stop Yelling At One Another

BuzzFeedNews: “…Thanks to its open, freewheeling public platform, and stance on free speech, Twitter has been a hothouse for ginning up disinformation, harassment, and outrage. A lot of these problems were caused, the company’s leadership believes, by product decisions made early in its existence. And in very Silicon Valley fashion, the San Francisco–based company is… Continue Reading