The Law and Business of Social Media
June 01, 2018 - Advertising, Blockchain, First Amendment, Artificial Intelligence, European Union, GDPR

Social Links: Laws affecting politicians using Twitter & tourists taking photos; the GDPR takes effect; lost Bitcoins

Finding that President Trump’s Twitter feed constitutes a public forum, a federal judge in New York City held that it’s a First Amendment violation when the President or one of his assistants blocks a Twitter user from viewing or responding to one of the President’s tweets. As the New York Times points out, the decision “is likely to have implications far beyond Mr. Trump’s feed and its 52 million followers.” A blog post on the online version of the monthly magazine Reason provides some tips for politicians with social media accounts who want to stay on the right side of the law.

Speaking of President Trump, the former secretary of a federal judge is claiming the President got her fired. Okay, not exactly. The secretary, Olga Zuniga, who worked for a judge on Texas’s highest criminal court, filed a lawsuit alleging that the judge—a member of the GOP—terminated her employment because he found Facebook posts in which Zuniga criticized President Trump’s and other Republican politicians’ immigration policies. A post on Popehat, a fellow ABA Web 100 honoree, explores the strength of Zuniga’s case.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect last Friday, May 25th. Now that the dust has cleared, if you are interested in up-to-date information regarding GDPR developments and compliance insights, check out our GDPR Resource Center. If you want details on what GDPR means for your outsourcing and other vendor agreements, you might want to attend our upcoming webinar.

The impact of GDPR is being felt across social media platforms in all sorts of ways. For example, in a move reportedly prompted by GDPR, Twitter has shut down accounts of those users who, at the time that they joined Twitter, were under 13 years of age, based on date-of-birth information voluntarily provided by such users during the registration process.

Facing an inbox full of companies’ privacy policy updates? You can blame that on the GDPR too. In fact, the onslaught of GDPR-induced privacy-policy updates inspired some pretty creative memes on Twitter.

Wait… the GDPR will also affect tourists taking photos with their phones?

Instagram is expanding its anti-bullying initiatives by using a machine-learning algorithm to filter out harassing comments and reviewing the accounts with an especially high number of blocked comments to determine whether the owners of those accounts have violated the platform’s community guidelines.

The still-unprofitable Snapchat will begin running six-second advertisements that its users will not be able to skip. These un-skippable commercials will not run during users’ personal stories, only during select Snapchat Shows—highly produced three-to-five minute programs from well-known entertainment companies.

The fascinating story of how Wired lost a small fortune in Bitcoin. . . . (Well, the Bitcoins are here, but the key has been destroyed.)

The Royal Wedding was a bigger topic on Pinterest than it was on Facebook. FastCompany speculates that it’s because Pinterest’s audience is predominantly women and reveals the subject of most of the Royal Wedding pins.