Man Ordered to Post Facebook Apologies to Wife to Avoid Jail
February 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
An Ohio magistrate gave Mark Byron a difficult choice: Go to jail, or post a long-winded public Facebook apology to his estranged wife — every day, for the next 30 days.
“It’s outlandish,” Byron told The Cincinnati Enquirer. “I’m afraid to do anything. People are even fearful that Facebook can be regulated by a judge.”
But a judge affirmed the magistrate’s ruling, and found the Facebook apology fitting in Byron’s case. Byron had blasted his wife in an earlier rant on Facebook, which violated a restraining order, the judge ruled.
Mark Byron, frustrated by divorce and child-custody proceedings, lashed out in a Facebook post in November. The post read in part:
“[I]f you are an evil, vindictive woman who wants to ruin your husband’s life and take your son’s father away from him completely — all you need to do is say that you’re scared of your husband…”
Byron’s post, and comments by his friends, made estranged wife Elizabeth Byron feel “afraid,” court documents state, according to the Enquirer. The post violated a restraining order that barred Mark from causing his wife “mental abuse, harassment, [or] annoyance,” the court found.
Critics say the court-ordered Facebook apology flies in the face of the First Amendment, because it’s court-compelled speech. Further, Mark Byron had blocked his wife from viewing his Facebook page — meaning, she somehow found a work-around to see it.
“She wasn’t harassed, because she deliberately sought this out,” an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation opined in the Enquirer.
Regardless, Mark Byron is complying with the court’s order, and has posted the court-approved Facebook apology every day since the ruling. The five-paragraph apology is more than 200 words long, and can be seen at Mark Byron’s Facebook page.
Related Resources:
- Court Orders Man To Apologize To Estranged Wife On Facebook (Cincinnati’s WLWT-TV)
- Domestic Violence: Orders of Protection and Restraining Orders (FindLaw)
- Browse Family Law Lawyers by Location (FindLaw)
- Harassment History Matters in Restraining Order Requests (FindLaw’s California Case Law blog)
Article source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/28/tagblogsfindlawcom2012-legallyweird-idUS389891994520120228
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California expected to reap Facebook windfall
February 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Facebook’s upcoming IPO could be a golden egg for the Golden State.
California could reap as much as $2.45 billion in additional revenues over the next five years from Facebook’s initial public offering, according to a new report issued by the state Legislative Analyst’s Office.
The newfound money would come from increased personal income taxes paid by Facebook investors and employees on their stocks, options and other holdings.
The report warns that a lot of uncertainties surround the Facebook filing, which could increase or diminish the windfall. At a minimum, the state should collect hundreds of millions of additional revenues over several years if the IPO proceeds.
Facebook filed for a $5 billion IPO on Feb. 1. It usually takes several months for a company to receive regulatory approval. Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s tax bill could reach $2 billion, according to some estimates.
Unfortunately for the state, however, its budget hole is bigger than Facebook’s filing. Governor Jerry Brown has forecast a shortfall of $9.2 billion, which does not take into account the social media titan’s IPO.
The analyst’s office said the governor’s revenue estimates are a little too rosy. It expects the state will take in $6.5 billion less, compounding California’s budget problem. State officials will have a better idea of their revenues when they issue a budget update in May. 
Article source: http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/28/technology/california_facebook/
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Facebook Intervention: Flagging Dorm Room Danger Through Social Media
February 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
John Gibson’s Facebook page was a window into a dangerous social life, one his parents and professors knew little about.
Wall posts about drugs and “crazy co-op parties” — a reference to student life at the University of California at Berkeley’s Cloyne Court Hotel — and photos of Gibson downing tequila hinted at habits that would dim the college junior’s bright future.
“Once you start putting that on Facebook, it’s not a one-time thing,” said Gibson’s mother, Madelyn Bennett. “Had I gone on his Facebook page earlier, I probably would have called him home from school for drug and alcohol counseling.”
By the time Bennett saw her son’s Facebook profile, it was too late. Gibson had overdosed. Toxicology tests would find cocaine, alcohol and marijuana in his blood, and he would awake from a coma six weeks later with irreparable brain damage.
Up to 98 percent of U.S. college students use social networks such as Facebook — a fact some health experts hope to use.
“I think Facebook is a new window on an old problem,” said Dr. Megan Moreno, a pediatrician at UW Health in Madison, Wis. Moreno has been studying whether online posts can predict offline problems, from drug and alcohol abuse to depression. “I don’t think we can use Facebook to make a judgment, but we can use it as a trigger to ask more questions face-to-face.”
Before the overdose, Gibson was a Regents and Chancellors Scholar at Berkeley, majoring in peace and conflict studies with a minor in pre-med.
“He planned to work for Doctors Without Borders,” said Bennett, who lives with her son in San Diego. “Now we’re hoping he’ll be able to go to bathroom on his own.”
Gibson’s round-the-clock nursing care costs more than $250,000 a year. On Feb. 23, Bennett filed a lawsuit, claiming Berkeley knew about drug abuse at Cloyne and failed to protect the students.
“They were more concerned about protecting the privacy and criminal behavior of students than safety,” she said.
Calls to Cloyne were not immediately returned.
The thought of using Facebook to flag risky, potentially illegal behavior raises ethical and legal questions: What should people do if they suspect a friend is in danger? And if they do nothing or their actions cause more trouble, are they liable?
Moreno said society is “still learning” what to do with the scores of information made public on Facebook. “And yes, we should be thinking about the ethical and legal side of this,” she said. “But we can’t let that get in the way of us just asking, ‘Are you OK?’”
For someone like Gibson, who has more than 800 Facebook friends, people might be less likely to speak up because of a phenomenon psychologists call the “bystander effect.”
“You can get a situation where 800 friends look around and say, ‘I’m sure his three closest friends are looking into this,’” said Moreno. “It actually mirrors what happens in the offline world.”
Aida Ingram, a youth counselor in Clayton, N.J., said it’s better to speak up than to assume the person is fine.
“It’s a shame for a whole community to watch a child spiral out of control, whether on Facebook or in the real world,” said Ingram, whose daughter will soon head to college. “The last thing you want is to go to someone’s funeral knowing you saw a worrying Facebook post and did nothing. I’d rather embarrass myself.”
Article source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodCommunity/flagging-dorm-room-danger-with-facebook/story?id=15783114
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Google+ Lags Far Behind Facebook, Twitter and MySpace in Latest Study
February 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
Google+ became the fastest growing social network within months of its debut last June, but a recent study casts doubt on whether most of its users are spending much time on the site.
According to ComScore, users spent an average of just 3.3 minutes on Google+ in the month of January, a decline from its recent figures and a tiny sliver of Facebook’s total.
On average, users spent 5.1 minutes on Google+ in November and 4.8 minutes in December while Facebook’s passionate audience logged between six and seven hours each of the past few months.
Most of the prominent social media companies site fall well short of Facebook by this measurement, but still lure their users for far longer than Google+. That even includes MySpace, which has an audience that is 27 million visitors smaller than Google+’s, but one that spend almost three times as much time on it.
This study only accounts for visitors using personal computers, so mobile is usage is not considered. But Facebook also has a large and active audience on the mobile platform – albeit one it needs to better monetize.
A Google spokeswoman gave this statement on the report: “The reality that Google+ is much more than a destination site makes it exceedingly hard for any third-party research firm to monitor or measure its performance. Google thinks about the service not as a site but as a deepening of its relationship to billions of existing users who are already committed to Google’s services like Search, YouTube, Android, etc. By this measure, engagement is already enormous.”
Google CEO Larry Page has struck an optimistic tone ever since the Mountain View, Calif.-based company debuted its social networking platform. In its most recent earnings call, he boasted of its 90 million users.
Also Read: Google 4Q Earnings Miss the Mark, Google Plus Hits 90M Subs
“I’m super excited about the growth of Android, Gmail and Google+, which now has 90 million users globally — well over double what I announced just three months ago,” Page told analysts.
Early ComScore studies lent support to Page’s confidence by demonstrating its expanding user base.
This latest report would seem to take a lot of air out of the balloon, but Google’s vice president of product management, Bradley Horowitz, downplayed the report to the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal also quoted many of Google’s partners expressing concern about the growth the service, such as social gaming company Zynga and chipmaker Intel.
Zynga’s COO told the Journal that Google+ has been “slow on the uptick with users,” suggesting that in those three minutes on Google+, people are not playing much “Cityville.”
Despite the report, Google’s share price is up almost 1.5 percent on the day.
Related Articles: ‘Free Ride’s’ Robert Levine on ‘Spooky’ Google and Hollywood’s ‘Offensive Excess’ Google 4Q Earnings Miss the Mark, Google Plus Hits 90M Subs
Article source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/28/idUS85205411620120228
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Twitter Ads Head to Your Phone
February 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
Twitter is expanding its ad program to iPhone and Android handsets, as the company gets more aggressive about ramping up revenue.
Twitter has already been showing some limited advertising on its mobile apps. But now it will start showing its “Promoted Tweets” — its primary ad product, and its attempt to replicate Google’s AdWords program — on phones, as well.
Just like the Promoted Tweets that Twitter shows on its primary Twitter.com site, these ads will show up in users’ “timelines.” At first, Twitter will only allow advertisers to place the ads in front of users who are already following their accounts. But within months, it will expand the program to allow marketers to reach people who don’t follow them — just as it does on the Web.
The announcement comes a day before a Facebook marketing event, where that social network is widely expected to roll out a mobile ad product of its own. So the timing may be more than coincidental.
But the bigger picture is that Twitter needed to increase its ad inventory anyway, in order to accomodate a wave of new ad buyers from its self-serve ad program. So this move would have come sooner than later.
Twitter says that any ad buys will automatically include mobile, and that it won’t sell mobile ads separately. One odd exception to the expansion: For now, the ads still won’t show up on iPads.
Article source: http://allthingsd.com/20120228/twitter-ads-head-to-your-phone/
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Ky. school aggressively fights Twitter criticism
February 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – A Kentucky university is aggressively fighting parody and criticism of school officials and policies on Twitter and other social media sites, which advocates and students say is an attempt to silence any negative comments.
Western Kentucky University’s president has used Facebook to lecture students about social networking etiquette, and officials persuaded Twitter to briefly shut down a parody account dripping with sarcasm and criticism with posts marked “(hash)wku.” Officials deny charges of censorship, but observers say the school appears to have immersed itself in social media deeper than many others around the country.
WKU junior Autum Calloway, a psychology major from Russellville, said she will tweet about things going on around campus. But she chooses her words carefully.
“I don’t ever criticize the school on Twitter because I don’t want an ordeal made,” she said, noting friends have been scolded by officials for postings deemed poor representations of the school.
To be sure, it’s common for universities to monitor cyber-chatter. But WKU president Gary Ransdell has jumped into the fray himself, taking to Facebook to scold students about inappropriate posts. And officials say they’re considering a new handbook policy that would be aimed at preventing online harassment.
Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group based in San Francisco, sees it as an attempt by WKU to immerse itself into the flow of ideas on Twitter and Facebook. Students may wind up choosing their words more carefully — like Calloway — to avoid running afoul of the rules.
“If you don’t know whether what you’re going to say is going to get you in trouble, you’re better off just not saying it and not getting in trouble,” he said. “And there you have it right there, speech is chilled.”
Any new policy also raises the question of whether a school could limit what students post when they’re off campus and not using school equipment. Many schools have anti-cyberbullying policies, but most of those apply only to school-owned servers and equipment, said Adam Goldstein, an attorney advocate with the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va.
The school has not yet drafted any language for the handbook or set possible punishments for violators, WKU spokesman Bob Skipper said. The school already has vague rules against “accessible communications deemed inappropriate.”
Violators of a new rule may face sensitivity training, but the idea is not to limit speech among students, said Stacey Biggs, WKU’s chief marketing officer.
“The point is not to tell them what they can or can’t say, or what they can or can’t say about WKU,” she said.
Still, critics have cried foul. The campus newspaper recently wrote a lengthy article under the headline “WKU trying to pull strings on social media.” And the parody account — temporarily shut down because it wasn’t clearly labeled as a parody — recently tweeted, “Campus police department has been renamed to twitter patrol.”
Student criticism prompted an official response that appeared recently in the campus newspaper. Biggs wrote that the intent is not to censor students but said the university “has to offer some amount of protection to its students.”
School officials have vigilantly searched for fake accounts filled with inflammatory comments, though Biggs said the school tries to have accounts taken down only if they use the university’s name or logo and don’t clearly state that they are parodies. In her commentary, she said such efforts are aimed at protecting the school’s reputation and brand.
Other schools do remind students that posts can reflect poorly on them in the eyes of a prospective employer, for instance. Some, such as the University of Kentucky in Lexington, limit that to a set of recommended “best practices.”
“You don’t really regulate conversations in a coffee house, for example,” said UK spokesman Jay Blanton. “The same principles apply here.”
UK’s existing campus policies applying to legal and ethical conduct extend to communications, including social media, he said.
At WKU, Ransdell weighed in on social networking in a Feb. 15 message on Facebook. He warned about the lasting consequences for irresponsible posts.
“We, at WKU, have become particularly conscious lately of some who are misusing social media and using some poor judgment,” Ransdell wrote. “So my message here is ‘Be smart.’ Use social media thoughtfully; always remember what you send is permanent and can be viewed years from now. Employers do their homework. They can and will track ways in which prospective employees have used social media. We, at WKU, track such things as well.”
Such efforts amount to attempts to “stop students from offending the government-paid administrators,” said Goldstein, the attorney advocate with the Student Press Law Center.
“Any institution that invests substantial effort into shutting down obvious parody accounts richly deserves to be parodied, because any institution with a good reputation for doing the right thing most of the time isn’t worried that obviously silly statements might be confused with its genuine policy,” he said.
Goldstein said he’s never seen a college president get so personally involved in the give-and-take in social media.
“I guess it’s good that he’s paying attention, but I wonder if this is really the best use of his time,” Goldstein said.
Article source: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/02/27/ky-school-aggressively-fights-twitter-criticism/
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Could Facebook Ride to California’s Rescue? The Ticker
February 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
In the next few years, Facebook’s biggest cheerleaders may be found not on Wall Street but in Sacramento.
California‘s Legislative Analyst Office just issued an updated report on the California economy, including projections for the next few years of state revenues. For the most part, it offers the kind of sober analysis one expects from a government bureaucracy, citing a host of problems holding back economic growth, including “persistent joblessness” and a “very troubled” housing market.
But the LAO report is hardly all gloom. “Wage and salary employment has increased at a healthy clip in recent months,” it says, and profits at many California-based companies have been booming; for its most recent quarter, Apple Inc. reported earnings of “about $1 billion per week.”
As a source of giddiness for the green-eye-shade crowd, however, Apple could yet be eclipsed by Facebook Inc. The company’s highly anticipated initial public offering is expected to produce a market capitalization of around $100 billion and generate “substantial capital gains and other income for a small number of Californians and, in so doing, generate additional tax revenues over the next few years.”
How substantial? The LAO acknowledges “a very large range of error” in its forecast. But presuming Facebook goes public this spring, LAO projects $500 million in Facebook-related revenue in 2011-2012 and another $1.5 billion in 2012-2013. All told, the LAO envisions $2.4 billion for the state through 2014-2015. “Should the IPO proceed,” the report states, “it appears virtually certain that the state revenue impact will be at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars, spread across a few fiscal years.”
If the stock soars, the report states, “the state revenue benefit could be $1 billion or more over the level we assume, spread across a few fiscal years.”
If only Washington had a magic revenue pony of its own.
(Francis Wilkinson is a member of the Bloomberg View editorial board. Follow him on Twitter.)
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Article source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-28/could-facebook-ride-to-california-s-rescue-the-ticker.html
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Facebook says suit filed with "ulterior motives" against it
February 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
New Delhi: Popular social networking site Facebook has told a Delhi court that the case against it for hosting allegedly objectionable content has been filed “deliberately with ulterior motives” and it is not responsible for the content on its website.
It alleged the lawsuit has been filed to “harass” it and is a “gross abuse” of law as it has been filed by a person who has approached the court with “unclean hands”.
Facebook sought a direction from the court to remove its name as one of the parties in the petition saying “it is not responsible for hosting the content that may appear on facebook.com or any website”.
“The plaintiff has filed the present suit with ulterior motives to harass Facebook. The present suit is a gross abuse of the process of law and filed with ulterior motive of publicity and causing harassment to it,” the company said in a written statement filed before Additional Civil Judge Praveen Singh.
Earlier, Yahoo India, which is also a party to the case filed by Mufti Aijaz Arshad Quasmi, had termed the suit as “motivated”.
Facebook India has also sought striking off of its name from the list of parties saying “it is not responsible for hosting the content that may appear on facebook.com or any website and it does not control or operate the servers that host the website facebook.com, which are located in the United States”. It said the plaintiff has deliberately concealed it from the court.
It said even the evidence, including images and videos relied upon by him, does not show that their source as facebook.com and that he has made “vague allegations in relation to some alleged content being hosted on certain websites.”
Alleging that he himself has “not come to the court with clean hands”, the company said he is not entitled to agitate any issue of public interest or alleged irreparable loss or damage to Indian culture as the present suit is private in nature.
It said the prayer made for removal of the alleged objectionable contents is “wrong and misconceived” and the suit is liable to be dismissed.
The company also said it has been impleaded under the incorrect description of ‘Facebook’ and stated that the correct name is ‘Facebook India Online Services Pvt Ltd’.
Meanwhile, Quasmi’s counsel Santosh Pandey said the written statement was not supplied to it by the company within the stipulated time period of 15 days as directed by the court on February 6.
The court had on February 6 given 15 days’ time to all the websites to file their written statements.
Facebook has made its submission in response to a civil suit filed by Quasmi against it, Yahoo, Google and other Internet companies objecting to certain contents on their websites which, he alleged had hurt the religious sentiments of various communities.
The court had earlier asked them to remove the objectionable contents in the form of photographs, videos or texts which might hurt religious sentiment.
The matter will come up for hearing on March 1.
PTI
Article source: http://zeenews.india.com/business/technology/facebook-says-suit-filed-with-ulterior-motives-against-it_42977.html
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Yahoo, Facebook in a shoving match
February 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Facebook News
Yahoo is accusing Facebook of patent infringement.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Facebook shot back at Yahoo Tuesday in the wake of Yahoo’s patent battle against the social media company.
Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) is trying to force Facebook into licensing 10 to 20 patents on various technologies involving advertising, messaging and social networking, according to media reports which have been confirmed by a source close to Yahoo.
“Yahoo contacted us at the same time they called The New York Times and so we haven’t had the opportunity to fully evaluate their claims,” said Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes, in a prepared statement to CNNMoney.
A look at Yahoo’s most recent quarterly earnings present a mixed picture that doesn’t necessarily match with the image of a company on the brink of death. Yahoo posted a $296 million profit for the fourth quarter of 2011, up 5% from a year earlier and matching analysts’ expectations.
Your Jetsons home is almost here
But quarterly sales of $1.3 billion were down 13% from 2010.
Yahoo has a new chief executive officer, Scott Thompson, who was anointed in January. He was previously the president of PayPal, which is part of EBay (EBAY, Fortune 500).
Earlier this month, Facebook filed for a $5 billion initial public offering.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly contained information that was not intended for publication. 
Article source: http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/28/technology/facebook_yahoo/
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Angelina Jolie’s leg spawns own Twitter account
February 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Twitter News
NEW YORK — Angelina Jolie’s leg has spawned its own Twitter account, and it’s an instant hit.
The Twitter feed dubbed “Angie’s Right Leg” has more than 12,000 followers by midday Monday.
Most of what Jolie’s leg has to say is fairly simple-minded. Sample tweets include “I’m a leg!” and “Look at the leg!”
At the Oscars, Jolie’s glamorous black dress featured a split by her right leg. She appeared to accentuate it while presenting the award for best adapted screenplay.
One of the winners of that category, “The Descendants” co-writer Jim Rash, mocked the pose while accepting his award.
___
Online:
http://twitter.com/AngiesRightLeg
Article source: http://bostonherald.com/track/celebrity/view/20120228angelina_jolies_leg_spawns_own_instant_twitter_account
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