The FBI brought William Lawrence Cassidy to trial for sending more than 8,000 distressing tweets over 2 months, to a leader of a Buddhist group. During that time, he threatened her life and wrote tweet haikus containing disturbing images of violence. His efforts scared her so much that she refused to leave her house for 18 months, but the judge overseeing the case ruled that Cassidy’s tweets were protected speech under the First Amendment, as they appeared on a public bulletin-board-like forum.

The judge said:

“…while Mr. Cassidy’s speech may have inflicted substantial emotional distress, the government’s indictment here is directed squarely at protected speech: anonymous, uncomfortable Internet speech addressing religious matters.”

According to the New York Times, the judge compared Twitter to communications during the colonial period:

He said, “A blog is like a bulletin board that a person of [the colonial period] might have planted in his front yard. If one colonist wants to see what is on another’s bulletin board, he would need to walk over to his neighbor’s yard and look at what is posted, or hire someone else to do so.”

With Twitter, he went on, news from one colonist’s bulletin board could automatically show up on another’s. The postings can be “turned on or off by the owners of the bulletin boards,” he wrote. In other words, one can disregard what is posted on a bulletin board. “This is in sharp contrast to a telephone call, letter or e-mail specifically addressed to and directed at another person,” the judge concluded.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

A few people have emailed me seeking examples of social media policies for schools or school districts, but I don’t have any such examples, so I would like to ask readers to help find any folks who have worked through social media policies for schools. If you send me example policies, suggestions or lessons from working through such school policies, I will gladly publish them on this site.

Please ask anyone you know who works with schools and policies, so we can find and share the best thinking with the many education professionals who are working through the challenges of social media in their schools.

You can send any suggestions here.

Thank you.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

The leading trade organization for market research professionals — CASRO — published guidelines for anyone conducting market research in social media.

The President of CASRO told research magazine that, “These are not mandated standards. We expect these guidelines will evolve based on changes in the social media environment and research industry. As such, comments, additions and edits are welcome and will be given careful consideration by our task force.”

There has been significant debate in the research community regarding the need for guidelines and standards in social media research. In particular, many researchers argue that such research is unethical without express consent of the consumers whose conversations are analysed. Others argue that any publicly available data is OK to use in market research.

Read CASROs guidelines here.

DISCLOSURE
My employer, Converseon, is an active member in CASRO.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

In a new book entitled lol… OMG! : What Every Student Needs to Know About Reputation Management, Digital Citizenship, and Cyberbullying, Stanford MBA student Matt Ivester explains the dangers of bad online behavior, based on his experience creating and leading a web service entitled JuicyCampus, starting in 2007. The book explains the dangers of bad online behavior, and offers advice to college students who want to enter the adult world with their reputations intact.

In 2007, Ivester founded JuicyCampus.com and invited students at Duke University to gossip freely and anonymously. When he started it, he thought it would be a fun place for college students, but it soon became, “… this malicious website where students were attacked. It got away from me,” he sid in a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “The posts named names, and they were racist, homophobic, misogynistic, vulgar, sexually explicit, deeply personal,” he wrote in the book’s preface.

JuicyCampus.com spread to 500 campuses, attracted investigations from two state attorneys general, spawned hundreds of complaints from college administrators, students, and parents, and even caught the attention of national broadcaster Katie Couric, who described JuicyCampus as a “malicious cesspool of barbs, disses, and insults.” In February 2009 Ivester shut it down.

Out of that experience, he Ivester realized that reputation management and cyber-bullying are big problems on college campuses, and there are not a lot of resources for college students. So, he wrote the book to raise students’ awareness of (1) how their decisions about posting content online will affect how others see them, and (2) how posting decisions by one student will affect the reputations of others.

The book includes carefully chosen anecdotes about videos, PowerPoints, and emails that were meant to be private, but were seen by millions of people.

Previous generations did not have to worry about their college experiments and mistakes living forever for billions to view, Ivester said. But, now, photographs of unflattering behavior, vicious comments on blogs, and even students choices of which pages to “Like” on Facebook could come back to haunt a student twenty years into the future.

“The book is all about personal responsibility,” he says. He starts from the premise that students are creating their online reputations with every piece of content that they post. Most of them enter college with an established digital trail. “Now it’s time for them to take control of that trail and make sure that they are portraying themselves in a positive light,” he says. Campus life offers many temptations and opportunities to experiment. What goes up online will be taken seriously by many people in the outside world. Prospective dates will do a search on their names. Professors, future employers, neighbors, and parents of the friends of their children — the list of possibilities is long.

The book describes ways students can protect their reputations, from carefully managing their privacy settings to constantly monitoring what appears about them online, in addition to a crash course in free speech and tips to help persuade others — either through friendly or litigious means — to remove unflattering content.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.