UWA Handbook 2025

Unit Overview

Description

More than a billion people, businesses, governments and other entities currently use social media. Judicial officers, courts, lawyers and other individuals in the legal system also use social media. However, the law generally struggles to keep up with making changes that are necessary or beneficial due to social media's existence. In this unit students will learn about how to critically analyse many of the key legal and ethical issues that social media and technology generally raise for the law. Some of the general technological issues that students will learn about in the legal context may include: emojis, artificial intelligence, deepfakes and the internet of things.

Four main themes of this unit are: (a) social media and technology generally pose many challenges and benefits for the legal system and there are many more yet to come; (b) Australian law is slow to adapt to social media and technology generally; (c) in some instances social media creates new situations that the legal system has yet to experience before and in some instances social media may simply be a contemporary take on a long-standing issue (it can be contentious which situation is which); and (d) it can be challenging to decide whether new ethical guidelines are necessary that apply to social media or whether existing ethical guidelines are sufficient to apply to social media (e.g. ethical guidelines concerning social media for the judiciary and for lawyers).

Credit

6 points

Offering

Availability	Location	Mode
Not available in 2025	UWA (Perth)	Face to face

Details for undergraduate courses

• Level 3 option in the Law and Society major sequence
• Level 3 elective

Outcomes

Students are able to (1) explain what the main social media are that Australians use and how social media is important to Australian society; (2) analyse the main challenges and opportunities that relevant legal stakeholders face when using social media; (3) evaluate how social media and technology impact upon established areas of law, including defamation, criminal law, employment law and evidence; and (4) compare and contrast the approach that courts in different common law systems have taken regarding social media and technology and the law.

Assessment

Indicative assessments in this unit are as follows: (1) tutorial participation; (2) an assessment; and (3) final assessment. Further information is available in the unit outline.

Student may be offered supplementary assessment in this unit if they meet the eligibility criteria.

Unit Coordinator(s)

Associate Professor Marilyn Bromberg

Unit rules

Prerequisites

For Law and Society major students: LAWS1111 Law, Conflict and Change
or LAWS1112 Adulting: Law for Everyday Lives
and LAWS2227 Law in Action.
All other students: completion of 48 points of study.

Advisable prior study

LAWS1104 Introduction to Law.
LAWS1120 Australian Legal Principles and Institutions, LAWS1111 Law, Conflict and Change
or LAWS1112 Adulting: Law for Everyday Lives
or LAWS2227 Law in Action.
Students who have not completed any advisable prior study will be required to undertake a legal research skills workshop and other seminars and learning modules at the discretion of the Unit Coordinator.

Contact hours

3 hours per week

Texts

A full reading list for the tutorials each week is provided on LMS. Since the unit is very contemporary and experiences changes all the time, there is no appropriate book for the unit. Instead, there are relevant articles, policy documents and internet pages that comprise the readings for the unit.

Some of the articles and policy documents that students will read in the unit are:

Marilyn Bromberg, ‘The Devil You Know Is Not Better - The Non-Consensual Distribution of Intimate Images and Sentencing’ (2020) 44 Criminal Law Journal 173. 

Marilyn Bromberg, Larissa Welmans and Cassandra Lee, ‘Reading between the Text(s) - Interpreting Emoji and Emoticons in the Australian Criminal Law Context’ (2020) 23(4) New Criminal Law Review 655. 

Luna Staes and Ruud Wouters, ‘“Indoctrinated by the Left!.”: How Politicians Respond to Street Protest on Social Media’ [2023] New Media & Society 1.