Even the Drug Companies are Monitoring Your Social Media

Switched drugs because they were too expensive or you didn’t like the side effects and told a friend or family member about it, or your doctor, on some kind of social media medium? Well, the big pharmaceutical companies are listening. They want to monitor perceptions about a product, shape ad campaigns, and gauge community receptivity. They are also using real-time healthcare databases using “de-identified” (meaning your name is not included) records to analyze diagnoses and switches in using drugs.

Facebook Wants to Be Your Place for Real Time Topics

Twitter’s claim to fame has been that it is THE place to discuss world events in real time. But, Facebook is now challenging that claim in the battle to be the digital water cooler. Facebook has a new Public Content Solutions team that is hiring TV execs, acquiring startups that analyze real-time event chatter, and forming partnerships so that news outlets can display Facebook’s generated topic stream. For example, Facebook just announced that NBC’s The Today Show will show Facebook trending topics on a giant in-studio touch screen. The show’s hosts can tap and swipe the screen to show Facebook posts of people discussing the topics. The Discovery Channel will also use Facebook’s new Hashtag Counter to let fans of car-racing show, Street Outlaws, vote for their favorite teams by posting to Facebook with the corresponding hashtag. Along a similar line, video views on Facebook have doubled in the past six months, prompting Facebook to adjust its News Feed algorithm to serve more videos to people who watch them and fewer to those who ignore them. The way Facebook ranks videos created on its site has also changed to include viewing time, in addition to likes, comments, and shares. This is, of course, all part of Facebook’s move to be the ‘go to’ place for all things digital.

Supreme Court to Hear Facebook Free-Speech Case

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case regarding the free-speech rights of a man who was accused of posting threatening messages on Facebook. The man's lawyers argue that a law banning speech that would be deemed threatening by a reasonable person shouldn't apply to Facebook messages, which are intended for people who know the speaker personally, and thus, might be less likely to take off-color comments seriously. The case revolves around a man sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for posting violent online rants against his estranged wife, law enforcement officials, and former co-workers. Experts predict that there are going to be more of these kinds of cases as people feel that they can get away with more incendiary speech on the Internet, in tweets and in texts.

Using Social Media to Advance Yourself

Rosabeth Moss Kanter brings up an excellent question in her blog post on how to use social media to advance yourself, your cause, and your career. She says that instead of asking how to use social media to advance each of those instead you should be thinking about how to advance the cause, the company, or the profession. As she points out, social media is already very self-serving. Instead, you want to be seen for something bigger than just promoting yourself. She says that instead of inflating what you have done, your insights, and accomplishments you should report your actions in a straightforward, non-hyped manner, and in turn, your virtues will speak for themselves. Then, when you ask your social media contacts for help - finding a job, attracting funding for a cause of new business venture, getting attention for an event—people will be more willing to help because they’ve experienced something positive. Social media helps you reach strangers, but strangers don’t have to engage with you unless they want to.

That seems like common sense, but as Kanter points out, so is keeping personal information personal. It should be widely known that indiscreet photos or inflammatory remarks can come back to bite you, but it also seems to be widely forgotten.

Reset the Net

A coalition of nearly two-dozen tech companies and civil liberties groups is launching a new fight against mass internet surveillance, hoping to battle the NSA in much the same way online campaigners pushed back on bad piracy legislation in 2012. The new coalition, organized by Fight for the Future, is planning a Reset the Net day of action on June 5, the anniversary of the date the first Edward Snowden story broke detailing the government’s PRISM program, based on documents leaked by the former NSA contractor. “Government spies have a weakness: they can hack anybody, but they can’t hack everybody,” the organizers behind the Reset the Net movement say in the video on the site. “Folks like the NSA depend on collecting insecure data from tapped fiber. They depend on our mistakes, mistakes we developers can fix.” To that end, the groups are calling on developers to add at least one NSA resistant feature to mobile apps, and on websites to add security features like SSL (Secure Socket Layer), HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security), and Perfect Forward Secrecy to better secure the communication of users.         

Terms of Service and Modeling Responsible Behavior

Terms of service are an interesting problem for teachers, students, and parents. The terms of service for many online tools popular for educators to assign to students require users to be 13 years or older, but that part seems to be forgotten sometimes when teachers are assigning useful tools to younger students. As Jennifer Carey, a director of academic technology at the Ransom Everglades School in Florida points out in a blog post, just forgetting about these terms of service – just giving them a “wink and a nod”- can model behaviors that run contrary to the advice parents and teachers give kids about other kinds of sites that also require users to be 13 or older. In her post, Carey advises teachers to read and understand the terms before asking students to sign up for services that may violate federal statutes that regulate student information. "Anytime you are considering an online tool or service, it's important to ensure that the security of your students plays a key role in your decision," Carey writes. Parents also need to pay attention to the tools their children are being asked to use.

Why What You Do in the Real World Matters on Facebook

A pair of studies by researchers at the University of Colorado-Denver explored the ways in which people break connections with one another on Facebook. They found that high-school friends, acquaintances, and co-workers are particularly vulnerable to being "unfriended," and not always for the content posted. "We found that people often unfriend co-workers for their actions in the real world rather than anything they post on Facebook," one researcher said.

When ‘Liking” Means You Have Voided Your Right To Sue

Many little ones love Cheerios, but might downloading a coupon for the product void your legal rights? General Mills, the maker of cereals like Cheerios and Chex as well as brands like Bisquick and Betty Crocker, has quietly added language to its website to alert consumers that they give up their right to sue the company if they download coupons, “join” it in online communities like Facebook, enter a company-sponsored sweepstakes or contest or interact with it in a variety of other ways.

Instead, anyone who has received anything that could be construed as a benefit and who then has a dispute with the company over its products will have to use informal negotiation via email or go through arbitration to seek relief, according to the new terms posted on its site.

Is this a new trend? Other companies besides General Mills are going in this direction. Big food companies are concerned about the growing number of consumers filing class-action lawsuits against them over labeling, ingredients, and claims of health threats. Almost every major gathering of industry executives has at least one session on fighting litigation. Of course, you have to wonder if this will spill over into individual cases. Will it be that you can’t claim cyberbullying if someone you have friended on Facebook starts harassing you?

Essential Social Media Rules

Taking stock of what more you should be doing to keep your kids safe on social media? Take a look at these 8 Essential Facebook Rules for Teens to find out if you have covered all of the basics. We all need a little reassurance every now and then that there isn’t anything that we’ve missed.

Is Self Reflection Being Hurt by Social Media?

Young peoples’ abilities to engage in self-reflection, analysis, and quiet contemplation -- "intrapersonal intelligence" -- have been compromised, asserts educator and school administrator Naphtali Hoff in his post entitled Is Twitter undermining kids’ intrapersonal intelligence?. Hoff writes that the focus now is on interpersonal intelligence, also known as being "people smart," with social media tools such as Twitter encouraging users to be "out there" constantly, leaving little time for private thought. After reading the post you have to wonder if young people are being deprived of opportunities to think “out of the box,” becoming too dependent on what everyone else thinks since they can ask that question constantly. It’s definitely something to think about.