Research Guides : Social Media: Law, Ethics and Current Awareness: Current Awareness

ABA Articles

From the Florida Bar

Rules Regulating the Florida Bar

Petition to Amend the Rules Regulating the Florida Bar 4-1.1 and 6-10.3 (Technology)
CHAPTER 4 RULES OF PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT SUBCHAPTER 4-1 CLIENT-LAWYER RELATIONSHIP
Rule 4-1.1 COMPETENCE
Explanation: Within the comment, adds that lawyers may need the assistance of nonlawyers with technological competence, that lawyers must safeguard confidentiality of information including electronically stored information, and that lawyers must understand the benefits and risks of technology used.

Below are just a few examples of social media tools that might be useful for attorneys.

1Password - Password Manager
1Password Remembers all your passwords.
Quip - Docs, Chat, Spreadsheets
Quip helps you share documents, spreadsheets and even chat and messaging.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to share and schedule posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts.
Evernote
Evernote allows you to save almost any content and share it with others.

Below are just a few examples of social media tools that might be useful for attorneys.

1Password - Password Manager
1Password Remembers all your passwords.
Quip - Docs, Chat, Spreadsheets
Quip helps you share documents, spreadsheets and even chat and messaging.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to share and schedule posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts.
Evernote
Evernote allows you to save almost any content and share it with others.

Social Media and the Florida Bar

Blogs

Legaltech News

Preparing for Unfathomable Social Media Events Following are a few cautionary tales of companies and brands caught up in social media challenges and a checklist of strategies you can use to help shield your company in cyberspace.
The Social Media Conundrum: Ethics Concerns for New E-Discovery Age Martin Tully and Philip Favro explored the navigation of data governance, ethics rules and more at Relativity Fest 2017

Social Media Checklist

Monitor Social Media
Register Your IP
Create Verified Accounts
Have a Social Media Policy
Vet Marketing Partners
Be Strategic With Enforcement

From: Preparing for Unfathomable Social Media Events

Social Media and Fake News

Stings and Scams: ‘Fake News,’ the First Amendment, and the New Activist Journalism Constitutional law, technological innovations, and the rise of a cultural “right to know” have recently combined to yield “fake news,” as illustrated by an anti-abortion citizen-journalist sting operation that scammed Planned Parenthood. We find that the First Amendment, as construed by the Supreme Court, offers scant protection for activist journalists to go undercover to uncover wrongdoing, while providing substantial protection for the spread of falsehoods. By providing activists the means to reach sympathetic slices of the public, the emergence of social media has returned journalism to its roots in political activism, at the expense of purportedly objective and truthful investigative reporting. But the rise of “truthiness” — that is, falsehoods with the ring of truth, diffused through new forms of communication — threatens the integrity of the media. How to respond to these contradictions is a growing problem for advocates of free speech and liberal values more generally.
Analysing How People Orient to and Spread Rumours in Social Media by Looking at Conversational Threads As breaking news unfolds people increasingly rely on social media to stay abreast of the latest updates. The use of social media in such situations comes with the caveat that new information being released piecemeal may encourage rumours, many of which remain unverified long after their point of release. Little is known, however, about the dynamics of the life cycle of a social media rumour. In this paper we present a methodology that has enabled us to collect, identify and annotate a dataset of 330 rumour threads (4,842 tweets) associated with 9 newsworthy events. We analyse this dataset to understand how users spread, support, or deny rumours that are later proven true or false, by distinguishing two levels of status in a rumour life cycle i.e., before and after its veracity status is resolved. The identification of rumours associated with each event, as well as the tweet that resolved each rumour as true or false, was performed by journalist members of the research team who tracked the events in real time. Our study shows that rumours that are ultimately proven true tend to be resolved faster than those that turn out to be false. Whilst one can readily see users denying rumours once they have been debunked, users appear to be less capable of distinguishing true from false rumours when their veracity remains in question. In fact, we show that the prevalent tendency for users is to support every unverified rumour. We also analyse the role of different types of users, finding that highly reputable users such as news organisations endeavour to post well-grounded statements, which appear to be certain and accompanied by evidence. Nevertheless, these often prove to be unverified pieces of information that give rise to false rumours. Our study reinforces the need for developing robust machine learning techniques that can provide assistance in real time for assessing the veracity of rumours. The findings of our study provide useful insights for achieving this aim. Figures
Deception Detection for News: Three Types of Fakes Citizens are frequently misinformed about political issues and candidates but the circumstances under which inaccurate beliefs emerge are not fully understood. This experimental study demonstrates that the independent experience of two emotions, anger and anxiety, in part determines whether citizens consider misinformation in a partisan or open-minded fashion. Anger encourages partisan, motivated evaluation of uncorrected misinformation that results in beliefs consistent with the supported political party, while anxiety at times promotes initial beliefs based less on partisanship and more on the information environment. However, exposure to corrections improves belief accuracy, regardless of emotion or partisanship. The results indicate that the unique experience of anger and anxiety can affect the accuracy of political beliefs by strengthening or attenuating the influence of partisanship.
Miley, CNN and The Onion Following a twerk-heavy performance by Miley Cyrus on the Video Music Awards program, CNN featured the story on the top of its website. The Onion—a fake-news organization—then ran a satirical column purporting to be by CNN's Web editor explaining this decision. Through textual analysis, this paper demonstrates how a Fifth Estate comprised of bloggers, columnists and fake-news organizations worked to relocate mainstream journalism back to within its professional boundaries.
Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election We present new evidence on the role of false stories circulated on social media prior to the 2016 US presidential election. Drawing on audience data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: (i) social media was an important but not dominant source of news in the run-up to the election, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their “most important” source of election news; (ii) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared eight million times; (iii) the average American saw and remembered 0.92 pro-Trump fake news stories and 0.23 pro-Clinton fake news stories, with just over half of those who recalled seeing fake news stories believing them; (iv) for fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads.