A New Jersey court ruled that Shellee Hale who was sued for defamation for comments she posted on a blog about the plaintiff is not a journalist shielded from lawsuits by New Jersey’s journalist shield law.
Professor Orin Kerr examines a recent case where the court answered the question posed above in the affirmative. The case is United States v. Durdley. Professor Kerr says, “I haven’t seen any cases quite like this, but I tend to think the decision is wrong. In this post, I wanted to explain the decision and then say why I find its reasoning rather unpersuasive.”
From the was that wrong department: A 16 year old boy alleges in charges filed against his mother, Denise New, that mom hacked into his Facebook account, changed his password and wrote defamatory material about him. The kid is asking for a no contact order from the court. Mom says she was just trying to monitor her son’s activities. The prosecutor won’t comment on the case.
cnet news: “The next friend request you receive might come from the FBI. The Obama administration has considered sending federal police undercover on social-networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. A confidential U.S. Department of Justice presentation (PDF) on social-networking sites made public Tuesday said online undercover work can help agents ‘communicate with suspects,’ ‘gain access to nonpublic info,’ and ‘map social relationships’.” The DOJ presentation states, “Why go undercover on Facebook, MySpace, etc.,? Communicate with suspects/targets. Gain access to non-public info. Map social relationships/networks.”
New York Times has a story about a study called “Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy” by Meeyoung Cha and Hamed Haddadi and Fabricio Benevenuto and Krishna P. Gummadi. The NYT article says:
“The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be “popular” Twitterers, but that’s not necessarily related to their influence. . . . The data the researchers had access to is astounding: 54,981,152 user accounts, 1,963,263,821 social (follow) links and 1,755,925,520 tweets. . . . In the end, what the researchers found was that follower count alone is not necessarily a worthy measure of determining influence.”
See the authors’ research paper.