Alex Reid

WikiLeaks has a pretty sweet Mastercard Parody video going around these days, soliciting funds for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s personal legal and security costs.

France’s broadcast regulator has prohibited the use of the words “Facebook” and “Twitter” from being mentioned on radio and television, unless that social network is the central part of a news story. So a newscaster can no longer say ‘follow us on Twitter’ or ‘give us your feedback on Facebook’ but could run a story about a politician who used Twitter to send pictures of his private parts.

The thinking is that mentioning these household brands is a form of “clandestine advertising”. The regulator, Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA), cites a 1992 statute governing the relationship between journalists and advertising, sponsorship, and “teleshopping”.

Now if this was enacted in Canada, the CBC would lose half of their news content.

(source)

Tweeting election results on Monday night may land you in jail.

Section 329 of the Canada Elections Act outlaws publishing election results from other ridings in constituencies where polls were still open. The keyword “publish” extends to the likes of Twitter and Flickr, but may not extend to some aspects of Facebook as the latter is usually a closed circle of friends and Twitter is open to the public, unless it’s posted to a public Facebook group or page.

The law that was created in 1938 states, “No person shall transmit the result or purported result of the vote in an electoral district to the public in another electoral district before the close of all of the polling stations in that other electoral district.”

The belief at the time was this would apply to major media broadcasters and would not impact private communications. For example, say I was in Halifax, I could call a friend in Vancouver and tell her about the election results, but tweeting it for the public to see amounts to public broadcast.

To see how the law applies to today’s social media world, we only have to go back a decade when a BC resident Paul Bryan posted riding results from Atlantic Canada on his website before the polls closed in BC.

Bryan was then charged by the Provincial Court of British Columbia and fined $1,000. He fought the charges as unconstitutional under section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protects freedom of expression and freedom of association. The Provincial Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 2003, allowing media organizations to tell voters in Western Canada the results of the 2004 federal election while polling stations in B.C. were still open. In reaction, in 2004, Elections Canada staggered voting hours across the country so that the majority of results from polls across the country are available within a few of hours of each other. In 2005, the BC Court of Appeal reversed the lower court decision and upheld the ban, saying it promotes fairness and ensures all voters receive equal treatment on voting day.

Bryan fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which voted 5-4 to uphold the original law, calling it “informational equality” with some judges believing that knowing the outcome of votes may sway undecided voters on the other side of the country.

The Court wrote:

“While the ban may be inconvenient for the media, this argument cannot be allowed to override as important a goal as the protection of Canada’s electoral democracy.”

Law professor Michael Geist points out that enforcing Section 329 would require banning access to Facebook and Twitter on election night, states the web site tweettheresults.ca, which was put together by a couple of Vancouver residents, which is quick to state that their site doesn’t host the actual results, but rather their site simply aggregates existing tweets using the hashtag #tweettheresults, but then again, repeating something in public over the Internet may equate to “publishing” just the same.

Like all laws, this law is only relevant if enforced and Bryan has been only person to be taken to court over this law so far.

Section 329 is punishable with a fine of $25,000 and a jail sentence of up to five years in jail.

Twitter hashtags:

#tweettheresults
#s329

HBO’s The Wire, is now part of the curriculum at the Johns Hopkins University.

As reported by the Baltimore Sun, Professor Peter Beilenson believed that talking about the show would be an entertaining way to get students to discuss the “complex web of problems faced by American cities.”

Apparently this isn’t a new idea, as Harvard, Duke and Berkeley, also have built courses around the widely-acclaimed television show. However, Hopkins has the advantage of being in Baltimore and included some of the people that the characters were based on, such as State Attorney Patricia Jessamy and the former Baltimore commissioner Ed Norris (who ironically plays a cop who bemoans the poor state of the Baltimore police department on the show itself). And of course, for the slam dunk, the show creator and producer David Simon was brought in.

The show’s 60 episodes would be the textbook and the class sessions would feature experts explaining how they wrestle with the same issues in reality.

While Simon had always said he wanted the show to serve as a pretext to the larger discussion around the social constructs of society, students are loving the class because they “get to watch TV for homework.”