Tag: ACTIVISM

It's commonly held that America's youth are largely apolitical, apathetic and increasingly antisocial, thanks in part to the Web. But a new study from the MacArthur Foundation and the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning is challenging that assumption. The study followed some 2,500 students from California schools, with 400 of them being studied over the course of three years. ...

Just about everyone not named Malcolm Gladwell can agree that Facebook played a pretty integral role in recent protests across the Middle East. The company, however, doesn't seem very interested in talking about it. According to the New York Times, Facebook's silence has more to do with business than sheer modesty. Although many have praised the social network as a critical mechanism of ...

Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook and the social media expert behind Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, has now launched a new social network designed exclusively for social activism. The idea behind the new site, called Jumo, is to help users find causes that mean a lot to them, and strengthen their ties with other, similarly minded activists. Hughes announced the project back ...

A new California law has worried free speech advocates by criminalizing the practice of impersonating someone else online. SB 1411, introduced to the California legislature in February and recently signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger, makes it a misdemeanor to impersonate someone without their consent "through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means for purposes of harming, ...

So there's this cheeky new app concept that's been floating around the Internet lately, and it's raised the question of how trademarks are protected in the virtual space. "The Leak in Your Hometown," an augmented reality app for the iPhone that hasn't yet been approved by Apple, captures any BP logo that the phone's camera detects, and superimposes an animated pipe, billowing some kind of miasma. ...

Share As the fallout from last week's oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico continues to ooze its way toward land, the cries of anger echoing throughout the social media stratosphere have only intensified. The principal target of the online rage is BP, which has been disparaged in thousands of posts across Facebook and Twitter. The company, which owns the Deepwater Horizon rig that sank on ...

After Governor Chris Christie proposed widespread cuts in funding for New Jersey's educational system, one former New Jersey high school student took it upon herself to organize a statewide walkout, via Facebook. Eighteen-year-old Michelle Ryan Lauto, a student at Pace University, created a special event on Facebook calling for all students to take to the streets in protest during regular ...

It used to be that distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks were strictly the realm of digital gangsters and elite hacker crooks. But, as part of a worrying trend, a growing number of political and activist groups have begun to employ such tactics as a form of protest. What's more, these hacktivists, as they're called, are developing new techniques for taking out servers and defacing Web sites ...

Actress, activist and former Woody Allen flame Mia Farrow is in the ninth day of her hunger strike for Darfur, which she has been chronicling on her own YouTube channel, the L.A. Times reports. According to the Times, the 64-year-old, noticeably gaunt Farrow has committed to a three-week hunger strike, during which she will consume only water, in order to raise the public's awareness of the ...

Animal rights activist group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has never been known for its subtlety. Actually, that's an understatement. PETA has long been known for its over-dramatic publicity stunts. It's not that we always disagree with PETA's goals, it's just that their methods make us so uncomfortable we start to think that maybe Ted Nugent isn't such a bad guy after all. ...

What do you do with your Facebook page? Maybe you compare your movie trivia knowledge with friends or post pictures of your weekend trip to the beach? How about using the social networking site to promote world peace? That's what a 16-year-old Ithaca, New York, high school student did in an attempt to create the world's largest human peace sign. His accompanying YouTube video was nominated in ...