To Start Off With My First Media Artifact Of Media Law

Scenario 2: Gary M. was arrested by the FBI when he showed up at a local mall to meet a "14 year old girl" for a date, which he arranged over the Internet. He didn't know that the "14 year old girl" was a 35-year old male FBI agent. Category of crime, crimes of public morality referring to cybercrime, charges Iowa code 705.1 solicitiation of a minor felony up to 5 years imprisonment and fines (Reuters, 2017).

While negotiating the brief I had to deliberate on the intended audience, the purpose and the genre markers inherent in my trailer. The trailer will be set in a haunted asylum, three film students will investigate the mental hospital to dismiss the rumours in a documentary format, it of course turns out the rumours are true and the trio need to try and escape the asylum with their lifes still intact. I chose the unisex young adult market for my trailer, persons aged 15 to 25. I also had to decide on what genre markers would be present in my trailer. The trailer is of course an advertisement and it's main purpose is to get the viewers to go and see the full release of the film in cinemas.

Marcum, G. (2007). Interpreting the intentions of internet predators: An examination of online predatory behavior. 16(4), 99-115.

It is not uncommon for someone to exaggerate the truth or to leave out facts about themselves on the web. In fact, you may even find that the person you thought you knew on the internet is nothing like their profiles in real life. Whether it is to stand out in the crowd or to fool someone into thinking you are someone else entirely, you should not believe everything you see or read online. With photo enhancements, little white lies, and the scam termed catfishing, you just never really know who you are talking to or what their intentions are. Michele Fleming and Debra Rickwood, authors of “Teens in Cyberspace”, determine that parents and the public share the concern of teens encountering predators and pedophiles on the internet and could lead to inappropriate relationships on and off the web. The young generation typically communicates with peers and people close in age, however, Fleming and Rickwood advise “Even though many teens appear Net-savvy, they still need to be reminded of the potential dangers lurking online. There may be many friends in cyberspace but there are undoubtedly a number of

In 2013, a man, investigators named the “Sexual Cyber Terrorist” extorted over 350 women by hacking into their email accounts and baiting them into giving him nude photos. If the women did not comply with his demand he threatened to hack into their social media accounts and posting photos that he allegedly already had of them. Another ploy to obtain these photos from women would be to pose as close friends and get them to send nude photos. After a thorough investigation the FBI found more than 3,000 nude to seminude photos of victims. The “Sexual Cyber Terrorist”, Karen (Gary) Kazaryan was sentenced to 5 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to all charges.

Are dating sites and apps being used properly and in a safe way? If someone lies in their profile and it puts them in any form of danger because of another person should they be punished or the other person? In the article, “Does youthful mistake merit sex-offender status?” by Jill Levenson informs us about how online misunderstandings are causing innocent people to be known as sexual offenders. Zachery Anderson a 19-year-old went on a date with a teenage girl he met on the app "Hot or Not" and they eventually ended up having sex together. The girl had lied about her age and was actually only 14 years old, making their encounter a crime. He ended up in jail and on the sexual offenders list because of a pure impulse and he thought it was legal. However because she lied he had to receive unfair consequences he shouldn’t have because he did a crime without his knowledge.

Oklahoma was the first state to put into place a law against catfishing and other states such as California, Texas and Pennsylvania are also looking to develop laws against catfishing (Allen). In 2014, a lady from South Bend, Indiana was sentenced to prison for catfishing. The woman had to serve two years in prison, three years of community service after she was released and also pay $57,000 in restitutions to the victims (Buckley). This is just one example of the legal trouble someone could get into for catfishing. Since in some states it is illegal and many other states are starting to follow in their footsteps, it is wrong to use someone else’s information in an online setting because it is breaking the

The person might even be in prison trying to get close to their catfishing victim for emotional, financial or physical harm later.

Although a genuine fan of the show, it dramatizes and endorses the use of deceit in social media for the use of self-validation. Users “catfish” others for a variety of reasons. Most of the time, the person hiding is obese, not pretty in society’s eyes, of the wrong gender, race or social class. Catfish unintentionally reinforces societal beauty standards in pop culture and to millions of viewers.

In most cases practical jokes, or pranks, seem funnier to the person staging them than the actual person being pranked. In the present day and age, pranks have found their way past the typical-fart-thing-under-the-couch-cushion, to more elaborate and harmful schemes of sorts. Adverse antics such as these have been found in most every online dating site and have achieved the nickname of “catfishing”. Ellen McCarthy explains, “…catfishing is a uniquely modern one: a single lie, enabled by the cloak of technology, that stretches, morphs and multiplies until whole personas are fabricated, emotions are manipulated and hearts are broken.” She continues to say that incidents of catfishing usually involves an elaborate lies that revolve around a life-threatening long-term disease or an overseas deployment and basically anything that one can think in order to avoid any face-to-face meeting (McCarthy). A very recent and more infamous incident occurred in the fall of 2012, right in the heat of the college football season. Manti Te’o, an all-star linebacker for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, had just been narrowed down to the top three candidates for the Heisman Trophy, the most prestigious award any college football player can receive regardless of position or seniority. He stated he had a girlfriend he met online that lived on the other side of the country while attending Stanford University, who had Leukemia. Everything was true from what he believed about her, and from outside sources, he received the news that she died of her life-threatening cancer on September 12, 2012, just a day after his Grandmother died. Finding out he had been “catfished” by none other than a male family friend who had once been a family friend, inflicted a major blow to his football career. Erik Brady states from back when the story hit the news, “Before

What is it? Catfishing is someone who pretends to be someone else online. They use fake identities and try to make the other individual feel that they are exactly what they say they are. Catfishing is very common on social media like Instagram, Tinder, Facebook, and Twitter.

Do you believe everything the media tells you? The media can sometimes depict events as spurious or perspicuous. Carlotta Walls LaNier, youngest of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of black students to go an all-white school, wrote an autobiography, A Mighty Long Way, revealing events in her life that the media illuminated and distorted. Events such as the first day of school at Central High, the video of Wilson being attacked, and bombings costing the city money were either illuminated or distorted by the media. During the integration of Little Rock, the media illuminated events that occurred, and distorted events by painting inaccurate or incomplete pictures.

Regretfully, however, the Internet is not only beneficial to those who use it without malice – it can be used to recruit victims of human trafficking. Deception is unrestrained online, and it can lead to oneself, or loved ones falling prey to modern day slavery.

Yet, the reality is that a woman may be talking to someone who is on parole for sexual abuse. There is absolutely no way to know whether or not someone is lying about their identity. I personally have always chatted on the Internet with skepticism. There are precautions one can take to prevent getting in trouble on the Internet. Some general rules one should follow include not giving out one's phone number, not giving out a picture of one's self, and not meeting anyone in person that one met on the Internet. Giving out a person's picture is one of the most common errors on the Internet. It never seizes to amaze me that the first question out of someone's mouth when they send me an instant message is if I have a picture. Although I do, I say no, unless it is someone that I positively know. Upon receiving someone else's picture, I often wonder if that is what the person really looks like. The world is full of dishonesty; it does not surprise me that some people use another person's picture. People have been known to pretend to be someone they are not while chatting. I admit that I have pretended to be someone else when I was really bored. I have pretended to be older than I am, I have pretended to be someone of the opposite sex, and I have pretended to be a very aggressive, outgoing person. I happen to be a person who is too passive most of the time.

Since the introduction of the World Wide Web and mainstream use of the internet to access information in 1990, the way people interact with each other has changed. Social media has opened up new mediums for people to communicate with each other. People exchange messages on Facebook, post tweets on Twitter, and “selfies” on Instagram. These new mediums have also changed the way people find romance and love. In this modern era, it is not uncommon to see people dating other people they have met on the internet. This has opened the door for “catfishing”, lying about your true identity on the internet in order to lure someone into a relationship. This has become so common that Molly McHugh of digitaltrends.com4 has described it as an epidemic. This essay will explore how catfishing has developed with the introduction of social media, why people catfish, and why talking over the internet makes it difficult to spot when someone is presenting a false identity. It will also identify the impacts that catfishing has had on society.