- Status check. In the recently released Corporate Directors Survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers, 41% of corporate board members reported that their companies monitor social media for adverse publicity. That's up from 32% in 2012. One commentator suggests that a company's entire board of directors—not just the members of its audit or risk committees—should be charged with social media oversight, given the reputational risk social media chatter poses and the medium's potential as an effective investor relations tool.
- Fightin' words? An Indonesian law student landed in a police detention cell for criticizing a historic city online because police in that country suspected her of running afoul of the 2008 Law on Information and Electronic Transactions, Indonesian legislation that provides prison time for anyone convicted of using electronic media—including social media networks—"to intimidate or defame others." Many criticize the law as being inconsistent with Indonesia's successful transition from an authoritarian state to a robust democracy.
- The wrong number. Twitter users sometimes give the social media company their cell phone numbers in order to be able to view tweets as text messages. But when a cell phone number that has been submitted to Twitter for that purpose is reassigned to a new user, do Twitter's text messages to that number violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act? Beverly Nunes claims they do. In a suit she filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Nunes is seeking class certification, and at least $500 in damages for each unsolicited Twitter text she received. In a Sept. 16 motion to dismiss Nunes's complaint, Twitter contends that the texts do not violate the TCPA because, among other things, they were not sent using an "automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice," as the statute requires.
Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations.
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