Are parents now liable for what their kids post to Facebook? According to a recent decision in the Georgia Court of Appeals, they are.
The Georgia Court of Appeals held that the parents of a seventh-grade student could be found negligent for failing to ensure that their son deleted an offensive Facebook profile that
Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can buy phony Facebook “likes.” And those can go a long way toward making a small business owner’s dreams come true, right?
Wrong, explains Facebook site integrity engineer Matt Jones in a recent post on the company’s official blog.
Businesses that purchase fake likes “won’t
Do you still “like” me? Companies with Facebook Pages will find themselves asking that question of their followers over the next few weeks, as Facebook brings an end to the popular practice of offering discounts, exclusive content and other incentives in exchange for liking a Page.
Facebook had previously facilitated this exchange by allowing Page
The latest issue of our Socially Aware newsletter is now available here.
In this issue of Socially Aware, our Burton Award-winning guide to the law and business of social media, we discuss an important Ninth Circuit decision refusing to enforce an arbitration clause in a website “terms of use” agreement; we examine
In the pre-Facebook era, the word “like” was primarily a verb (and an interjection sprinkled throughout valley girls’ conversations). Although you could have likes and dislikes in the sense of preferences, you could not give someone a like, claim to own a like or assert legal rights in likes. Today, however, you can do all
In a little-noticed decision, Matter of Noel v. Maria, Support Magistrate Gregory L. Gliedman—a Staten Island, New York family court official—recently permitted a father seeking to modify his child support payments to serve process on the child’s mother by sending her a digital copy of the summons and petition through her Facebook account.
Magistrate Gliedman’s decision struck us at Socially Aware—where we follow such developments closely—as a groundbreaking move. We are unaware of any published U.S. court opinion permitting a plaintiff to serve process on a domestic, U.S.-based defendant through a Facebook account.
As we addressed in a 2012 Socially Aware blog post, in Fortunato v. Chase Bank a federal district court in Manhattan held that Chase Bank could not rely on Facebook to serve a third-party defendant.
While the same federal district court subsequently allowed the FTC to serve defendants through Facebook in FTC v. PCCare247, the service at issue in that case concerned documents other than the summons and complaint, and the defendants were two India-based entities and three India-based individuals who had already appeared through counsel and shown themselves to be on notice of the lawsuit.
Other cases authorizing service via social media have been similarly limited in scope. For example, in WhosHere v. Orun, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia allowed service via social media on a defendant who allegedly resided in Turkey. In Mpafe v. Mpafe, a Minnesota family court authorized the service of divorce proceedings on a defendant by “Facebook, Myspace or any other social networking site” where the defendant was believed to have left the country.
