Handbook of Social Media and the Law

Laura Scaife

• Publisher: Informa Law from Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317754787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Media & Entertainment Law
• Index: Law

Billions of minutes a month are spent globally on social media. This raises not only serious legal issues, but also has a clear impact on everyday commercial activity.

This book considers the significant legal developments that have arisen due to social media. It provides an expert explanation of the issues that practitioners and businesses need to consider, as well as the special measures that are required in order to minimise their exposure to risk. The content is highly practical, and not only explores the law related to social media, but also includes useful aids for the reader, such as flow charts, checklists and case studies.

Various categories and channels of social media are covered in this book, alongside the legal classification of different social networks. Social media is also considered in the context of human rights law by evaluating the implications this has had upon the development of civil and criminal law when pursuing a civil remedy or criminal prosecution in relation to online speech. As part of these discussions the book deals specifically with the Defamation Act 2013, the Communications Act 2003, the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and the Contempt of Court Act 1988 among other key issues such as seeking Injunctions and the resulting privacy implications.

Finally, the author also pays careful consideration to the commercial aspects raised by social media. The reader will find reference to key cases and regulatory guidance notes and statutes including, the Data Protection Act 1998 (including the draft Data Protection Regulation), user privacy, human rights, trading and advertising standards, special rules for FCA regulated bodies and social media insurance.

This book is an invaluable guide for private practice and in-house practitioners, business professionals, academics and post-graduate students involved in the law surrounding social media.

Part 1

Background

1 Introduction to social media and the law

1.1 Introduction

1.1.1 Utility of social media

As an emerging technology with nearly limitless boundaries and possibilities, social media has given users unprecedented engagement with brands, companies, and other users. It is possible – common even – to reach an unlimited audience with the click of a mouse or the use of a Smartphone. However, although most users will have an idea of what social media means to them (e.g. the ability to contact friends or make new connections), in order to locate social media within the law it is necessary in this first chapter to consider the types of social media that individuals use every day and how it is defined by the law. Without doing so it would be impossible to go on and apply the areas of law that social media affects in a meaningful way, or understand why the law has developed or the deficiencies in the law that have been presented due to a misunderstanding as to what the law is seeking to achieve.

1.1.2 Background to the development of social media

The potential for computer networking to facilitate newly improved forms of computer-mediated social interaction was initially suggested during the infancy of the internet.¹ Efforts to support social networks via computer-mediated communication were made in many early online services, including Usenet,² ARPANET, LISTSERV, and bulletin board services. Many prototypical features of social networking sites (SNSs) were also present in online services such as America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, ChatNet, and The WELL.³ Early social networking on the World Wide Web began in the form of generalized online communities such as Theglobe.com (1995),⁴ Geocities (1994), and Tripod.com (1995).

The early communities focused on ‘bringing people together’ to interact with each other through chat rooms, and encouraged users to share personal information and ideas via personal web pages by providing easy-to-use publishing tools and free or inexpensive web space. However, other communities, such as www­.cl­ass­mat­es.­com­, took a different approach by simply having people link to each other via email addresses.

By the late 1990s, the nature of the sites began to change. User profiles became increasingly important as user demand for the ability to compile lists of connections, often referred to as ‘friends’, increased. The use of profiles with user data allowed users to search for and connect with other users with similar interests or shared connections. As user demand for such features increased, sites developed increasingly sophisticated offerings that allowed users to find and manage friends.⁵ In 1997, the ‘next generation’ social networking sites began to flourish with the introduction of sites such as SixDegrees.com.

The third generation of networking sites began in the early 2000s. Makeoutclub was introduced in 2000, with Hub Culture and Friendster following in 2002.⁶ Facebook was first introduced (in 2004) as a Harvard social networking site.⁷

Such sites soon became part of users’ internet consumption, and by 2005, it was reported that MySpace was getting more page views than Google. Facebook⁸ became the largest social networking site in the world⁹ in early 2009.¹⁰

1.2 What is ‘social media’ and a ‘social network’

1.2.1 History

Owing to the explosion of Web 2.0 and the increasing sophistication of technologies that can be used to access web content, users both produce and consume significant quantities of multimedia content. Moreover, this behaviour when combined with social networking (i.e. communication between users through online communities) has formed a new internet era where multimedia content sharing through social networking sites is an everyday practice. More than 200 social networking sites of worldwide impact are known today and this number is growing fast. Many of the existing top websites are either pure social networking sites or offer some social networking capabilities.¹¹

A social networking service is a platform to build social networks or social relations among people who, for example, share interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections. A social network service consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his or her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web-based and provide means for users to interact over the internet, such as email and messaging. The service usually allows individuals to create a public profile, to create a list of users with whom to share connection, and view and cross the connections within the system.¹² In recent years, social networking sites have become increasingly varied and they now commonly incorporate new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity, photo/video/sharing, and blogging.¹³ Online community services are sometimes considered to be social networking sites, though in a broader sense, social networking site usually means an individual-centred service, whereas online community services are group-centred. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, pictures, posts, activities, events, and interests with people in their network.

1.2.2 Social interaction

Social media has arguably changed the way in which we entertain ourselves and as a result the way in which individuals conduct their daily lives. Social networking is one of the primary reasons that many people have become avid internet users. In 2014, the number of active mobile phones will exceed 7 billion. However, as noted by the US Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence in 2011, ‘though the term “social networking” tends to conjure up immediate visions of Facebook and Twitter, the origins of the term are far less humble. In the era before the existence of the internet, social networking was the process of conventional human interaction that took place in key locations like schools, marketplaces, religious centres, and sports events.’¹⁴

It has been suggested by research conducted by Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe that online social networking sites support both the maintenance of existing social ties and the formation of new connections.¹⁵ Much of the early research on online communities assumed that individuals using these systems would be connecting with others outside their pre-existing social group or location, liberating them to form communities around shared interests, as opposed to shared geography.¹⁶ The early research was predicated on an assumption that when online and offline social networks overlapped, the directionality was online to offline – online connections resulted in face-to-face meetings. Parks and Floyd (1996) report that one-third of their respondents later met their online correspondents face-to-face and that this implied that online relationships rarely stayed there.¹⁷

It is suggested that next-generation social networking sites have significantly changed the way in which individuals communicate with other and that the shift from online to offline as suggested by early research does not necessarily correlate with how modern social networking occurs. Although this earl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Detailed contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Cases
• List of Legislation
• Part 1 Background
• Part 2 Civil claims
• Part 3 Criminal liability
• Part 4 Commercial law
• Bibliography
• Index