Naturally, the subsequent trial of Lori Drew, the woman who allegedly instigated the MySpace hoax, has played out with extreme interest from all sides of the debate over cyberbullying. Today, in a somewhat surprising decision, a Federal judge temporarily dismissed the conviction against Drew as he reconsiders the facts of the case.

From KTLA:

In a stunning move, a federal judge has tentatively decided to reverse a jury’s verdicts and acquit a Missouri woman who had been convicted of computer fraud charges stemming from an Internet hoax that prompted a teenage girl to commit suicide.

Lori Drew was convicted in November of three misdemeanor counts of illegally accessing a protected computer.

She was expected to be sentenced today in a widely publicized “cyber bullying” case that resulted in the suicide of a 13-year-old girl.

The charges stemmed from the death of 13-year-old Megan Meier, who committed suicide after being “dumped” on MySpace by a fictitious boy Drew helped create.

U.S. District Judge George H. Wu says his decision is tentative, and will not become final until he issues a written ruling.

We have covered the tragic story of Megan Meier previously at the ReputationDefender Blog, and we will continue to bring updates as news of the case continues to unfold.

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Some of the major changes announced were previously covered at the ReputationDefender Blog, and include more targeted publishing options for status updates, and simplifying privacy controls to encourage increased sharing on the site.

Facebook users will be presented with more robust privacy options that they can tailor to their social networking needs. Much like Twitter, Facebook users can blast updates to everyone and have them visible to search engines with these new tools. Users will also be able to tweak personal and professional contact lists in order to better control who sees what online.

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Another twitter like change announced recently includes the ability to follow other people, even if they do not friend you. Regional networks will be eliminated, as these new features are rolled out in the coming weeks.

Adam Ostrow has a well written piece at Mashable that succinctly explains these Facebook privacy changes.

Ultimately, Facebook users that are deeply concerned with privacy can breathe a deep sigh of relief – your profile will remain just as private as before if you want it to. Meanwhile, for those that want to broadcast their updates publicly, have them indexed by search engines, and link to them from their blogs and other social networking profiles, those features are on the way.

ReputationDefender applauds these announced Facebook privacy changes that will engender increased sharing online. Balancing family, friends and professional colleagues online is a challenge for individuals living digital lives. These publishing options will allow people to share as much, or as little as they like and create a meaningful online identity on the process.

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From the post:

Reviewing the book for The Boston Globe on Sunday, Roberta Silman wrote: “This new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired.” In a series of Twitter posts, Ms. Hoffman fired back with her own opinion. “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron,” she wrote. “How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.” Ms. Hoffman also lambasted The Globe and went so far as to post Ms. Silman’s phone number and email, inviting fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

Naturally, Hoffman’s rant, particularly the part where she gave away Silman’s phone number and e-mail, did not settle well, leading to a full apology the next day. Hoffman also disabled her Twitter account, presumably to mitigate any further reputational damage caused by this unfortunate affair.

While there are some out there who will no doubt feel sympathy for Hoffman, or even say her actions were justified, the truth of the matter is that she chose the wrong venue to air her grievances. Social media makes sharing your opinions easier than ever. But, that doesn’t mean that all of your opinions need to be shared.

In his coverage of this story, Frank Reed at the Marketing Pilgrim Blog suggests that people should have licenses to use social media in the same way they have licenses to drive cars. While he’s clearly joking, or at least half-joking, maybe there’s some value in that idea. The Internet can be a wild place, for sure, but social media doesn’t have to be. Intelligent, productive, and meaningful conversations can happen online. You just have to be the one that starts them.

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Quoting from the page:

Libby Sartain, former CHRO at Yahoo! Inc., is now an executive in residence at the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), the company announced today. Sartain brings more than 30 years of experience in HR and business to i4cp’s expanding array of corporate performance experts.

As an executive in residence at i4cp, Sartain will be available to participate in the major project assignments i4cp conducts over the course of a year. She will also provide her insight to aid in the development of:

· Playbooks, designed to enable managers and leaders to take action based on specific scenarios and situations;
· Pulse Survey Analysis reports, which analyze and interpret the research data from i4cp’s 50+ annual studies;
· Highlight Reports, which take an in-depth look at each of i4cp’s 58 topics of expertise and provide research, corporate examples, scenario planning and more.

Sartain, who was a keynote speaker at i4cp’s 2009 Annual Conference, will also be available through i4cp membership to business leaders seeking input and/or advice on specific projects their companies are facing.

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Sartain is the author of HR from the Heart: Inspiring Stories and Strategies for Building the People Side of Great Business (AMACOM) and Brand from the Inside: Eight Essentials to Connect Your Employees to Your Business (Jossey-Bass), as well as the recently released Brand for Talent: Eight Essentials to Make Your Talent as Famous as Your Brand (Jossey-Bass).

For full disclosure, Libby is an adviser to ReputationDefender. I have recently posted a guest post on her blog, Brand for Talent, that examines how search engines are impacting job searches in the digital era.

ReputationDefender congratulates Libby on her new leadership position and is grateful for the insight she has lent to this firm over the years.

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Because of social media, I feel like Michael Jackson died right on my doorstep. The neighbors, more numerous than I had previous thought lived on my block, are all gathered around. Michael Jackson was a cultural phenomenon, a truth substantiated by the strong reactions his death has generated.

The online responses to Jackson’s death have been many and varied. It’s been only a day since Michael Jackson passed away, but Twitter and Facebook are crowded with thoughts  about the King of Pop. The L.A. Times reports that other servers, too, are straining under all the transactions they’re trying to support.

Much of this activity is generated by the neighbors who genuinely grieve. Thanks to some dodgier Internet users though, there are also a lot of opportunities to contract malicious software floating out there on the web. As posted on Mashable, there are those who would offer Michael Jackson related news but only link you to malware. Be careful.

Another matter in which to exercise caution: false spin-off news. After Jackon’s death followed Farrah Fawcett’s, false information spread about other celebrities who had died. One of the prominent pieces is about  Josh Bloomberg. The original article was written as a parody, but casual words have passed so quickly that the truth got temporarily capsized. Fortunately though, there are reliable online sources that are quick to refute such claims. At any rate, a good dose of skepticism is usually a healthy thing to nurse when evaluating fresh information.

For anyone curious about how the news began, SEOmoz mapped the journey Michael Jackson’s death took across the web. It is interesting to note how such small beginnings expanded so rapidly and to such great porportions once they hit the popular social media sites.

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The company’s efforts in this regard have led to some major changes to the website’s interface. The result has left many Facebook users angered and annoyed. Just this past March, Facebook switched the whole layout of the site, prompting major protests. Now, it seems, Facebook is hoping to further mimic Twitter with a major new change to the way messages are shared within the network.

In an effort to increase the amount of public data Facebook shares with the world, the company has implemented an “improved” Publisher application, which gives users the choice of sharing their information with everyone.

As described by TechCrunch, the feature works like this:

You can now control who you want to inform of your Facebook friends when you add any kind of content to the site. Here’s how it works: After writing a status, uploading a photo or creating other content from the Publisher, use the lock icon in the lower-right corner of the Publisher to access the drop-down menu. From there, you can then choose to make the post visible to everyone, friends and certain networks, friends of friends, and a custom list.

The idea of allowing users to selectively share content with the world is fine. The question is, will this alienate some of Facebook’s most loyal users? What made Facebook likeable compared to other social networking sites was its sense of privacy. Unlike MySpace, which has devolved into a spam-filled nightmare of glitter writing and loud unstoppable music, Facebook allowed people to make connections with friends and family in a setting that was clean and easy to use. As the site moves more and more toward a Twitter-like live streaming interface, however, the notion that Facebook is a “closed community” is being called into question.

I have no problem sharing information about myself online (I have a blog and I use Twitter) but, for me, that’s not what Facebook is for. I use Facebook as a way to connect with friends whom I might not take the time to personally e-mail or call. That’s it. In its effort to become more and more like Twitter, I fear Facebook may lose some of its value as a networking tool and become just another haven for self-promotion and spam.

Perhaps I’m overstating this change. After all, it is optional, so there’s a good chance that all the Facebook users who think like me will simply opt out. What do you think? Are Facebook’s attempt to become more Twitter-like helping or hurting the site?

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I would like to look a bit more closely at Twitter in this post and examine why it has experienced such a remarkable cultural zeitgeist. First, we must come to terms with the fact that everyone loves, uses and talks about twitter. And I mean EVERYONE. CNN is tweeting. Politicians are tweeting. Celebrities like Ashton are tweeting. Oprah is tweeting, for the love of fun, and she makes and breaks main stream culture for a living. Read any social media blog or tech news site and you’ll inevitably run into a few twitter articles- per day.

So the question then becomes- WHY? Why have web nerds, tech-savvy students, PR firms, celebrities, politicians and the media complex writ large embraced the micro blogging platform?

The first reason has to do with ease of use. Not everyone has a laptop. The number of smart phones with web capabilities is growing, but still small. But almost everyone has a phone that can send SMS data. That means that Twitter opens the door to global, real time communication to end users who carry nothing more than a cell phone. That fact, in turn, lets more people participate in the twitter-verse by lowering the technological barrier of entry. The results are staggering. From the recent Iranian updates to breaking news via tweeting, the fact that a text message can now be heard around the world is an impressive and important milestone for connective technologies. It is also the primary reason that Twitter is so pervasive at the moment.

But ease of use can not explain the twitter-quake that has sent shock waves across media and culture. There are many reasons for the ubiquitous tweeting now found in the media landscape, but the one that resonates most with me is the overcompensation theory. I believe that the main stream media is overly hyped up on twitter because they were overly harsh on bloggers in the past and are now repping micro-blogging to seem “hip” and “with it.” In the recent past, traditional journalists often scoffed at bloggers and downplayed their journalistic credentials repeatedly. But the blogosphere would not be denied. It knew there was a real there there. And now blogs are seen as real and staying. And the MSM missed that bet completely. From politics to sports to local news, blogs have repeatedly held journalists and citizens accountable. Blogs have fact checked stories and reinvented old notions of the news cycle. Bloggers now routinely meet with Presidents and CEOs.

And now the intertubes are all aflutter with twitter. And this time, THIS TIME the MSM are not going to be left behind in the wake of a great techno shift. So they tweet and they tweet and they tweet. And part of the reason is because the technology is new and brilliant and connective and disruptive. And part of the reason is because they don’t want people to remember how established media cast a death knell for one of the most vibrant forms of media, art and online socializing ever created.

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“Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.,” the City form states. There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.

The move raises significant privacy concerns and, as the article notes, may even violate the Terms of Service for these sites. ReputationDefender advises readers to never disclose their passwords to anyone in order to maintain their online security and privacy.

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[SOURCE]

Reports of violence between police and protesters are posted to Twitter in real time, while demonstration videos and images are shared on Flickr and YouTube accounts. Blogs detailing savage student beatings and daily protest schedules are also spreading rapidly. Social media is clearly fanning the flame of government resistance.

Social media is no stranger to this radical role (remember Twittering out of jail in Egypt), but this is one of the first instances blogs and social networking sites have been viewed as superior sources of information than traditional media outlets. For perhaps the first times in history, the world can watch on as citizens literally fight for their freedom against an authoritative regime and it is all thanks to social networking. Even the U.S. government believes in social media’s power, reportedly the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to delay its scheduled maintenance session so the latest Tweets from Iran could be monitored.

While these developments are promising, and historically relevant, there are still issues regarding social media’s long-term viability as a news source. Because anyone can create a blog or send a Tweet, it is impossible to know if a story is reliable. This means that, as with all web-based communications, users must look at everything tagged “Iran Election” with a critical eye. It is the classic double-edged sword of web content. While the Internet allows you to receive uncensored and up-to-the-minute information, it is up to you to verify the information. For tips on the best ways to follow the Iran Election using social media, check out Ben Parr’s recent post at Mashable.

What do you think? Has the explosion of Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking websites in relation to the Iran election crisis set a new precedent for how the world consumes breaking news stories?

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[SOURCE]

In an interesting article for Time.com, Belinda Luscombe shares the following story.

Not long after Patrick told his wife Tammie he wanted a divorce, she posted an angry, hurt note on “the wall,” or public-comments section, of his Facebook page. Embarrassed that his colleagues, clients, church friends and family could see evidence of his marital woes, he deleted it and blocked his wife from seeing his page. A couple of days later, the IT worker in Florida–who asked that his last name not be used in this story — found alarmed messages from two Facebook friends in his inbox. Tammie had used a mutual friend’s account to view Patrick’s wall and e-mailed several women he had had exchanges with. He says her e-mails were borderline defamatory. She says they merely noted that he was married with children, a fact he had left off his Facebook profile. Either way: Ouch.

As if getting humiliated in public weren’t enough, the article goes on to highlight a number of instances where divorce attorneys have used information on a social networking site to gain a legal advantage in the courtroom.

Did your husband’s new girlfriend Twitter about getting a piece of jewelry? The court might regard that as marital assets being disbursed to a third party. Did your wife tell the court she’s incapable of getting a job? Then your lawyer should ask why she’s pursuing job interviews through LinkedIn.

Worst of all, there’s little to no legal recourse for victims of Internet slander, unless they want to involve their children, making an already painful situation worse.

There’s little the besmirched can do legally, unless there are children involved. Family-law courts routinely issue restraining orders to prevent one parent from disparaging another to a child. “The question is, If it’s on the Internet, can that speech be blocked?” says Stephen Mindel, a managing partner at Feinberg, Mindel, Brandt & Klein in Los Angeles. “The First Amendment is going to come into conflict with the family-law courts.”

As we’ve written about before on the ReputationDefender Blog, people don’t always think through their actions when they’re online, operating under a deluded sense of anonymity. Unfortunately, the pain of an Internet attack is very real and has lasting consequences. When coupled with the already vitriolic atmosphere of a divorce, social networking sites are the perfect platform for an angry individual to launch a permanently scarring smear campaign.

As a society, we are still adjusting to the realities of the digital world. An offhanded remark on a blog can keep you from getting a job. A seemingly innocuous photo could keep you from getting into the college of your choice. Opening up your life to public scrutiny online has tremendous advantages (professional networking, making new friends, etc.) but there are also drawbacks. Taking a pro-active stance in managing how people perceive you online is critical to living a successful digital life.

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