An advertising executive who lost his job after being named on an anonymous Instagram account is suing the now-defunct account for defamation. The suit names as defendants not only the account—Diet Madison Avenue, which was intended to root out harassment and discrimination at ad agencies—but also (as “Jane Doe 1,” “Jane Doe 2,” et cetera) several of the anonymous people who ran it. Whether Instagram will ultimately have to turn over the identities of the users behind the account will turn on a couple of key legal issues.
A bill recently passed by the New York State Senate makes it a crime for “a caretaker to post a vulnerable elderly person on social media without their consent.” At least one tech columnist thinks the legislation is so broadly worded that it violates the U.S. Constitution. That might be so, but—in light of several news reports about this unfortunate form of elder abuse over the last few years—that same columnist may not be correct about the bill likely having been passed in response to a one-time incident.
A new law in Egypt that categorizes social media accounts and blogs with more than 5,000 followers as media outlets allows the government in that country to block those accounts and blogs for publishing fake news. Some critics aren’t buying the government’s explanation for the law’s implementation, however, and are suggesting it was inspired by a very different motivation.
Critics of the most recent version of the European Copyright Directive’s Article 13, which the European Parliament rejected in early July, brought home their message by arguing that it would have prevented social media users from uploading and sharing their favorite memes.
In a criminal trial, social media posts may be used by both the prosecution and the defense to impeach a witness but—as with all impeachment evidence—the posts’ use and scope is entirely within the discretion of the trial court. The New York Law Journal’s cybercrime columnist explains.
To thwart rampant cheating by high school children, one country shut down the Internet nationwide during certain hours and had social media platforms go dark for the whole exam period.
Snapchat now allows users to unsend messages. Here’s how.
Employees of Burger King’s Russian division recently had to eat crow for a tasteless social media campaign that offered women a lifetime supply of Whoppers as well as three million Russian rubles ($47,000) in exchange for accomplishing a really crass feat.
We’ve all heard of drivers experiencing road rage, but how about members of the public experiencing robot rage? According to a company that supplies cooler-sized food-delivery robots, its’s a thing.