Social networking websites are places on the Internet where people can connect with those who share their interests. These sites began to appear in the mid-1990s, and gained traction in the early 2000s. Typically, social networking refers to sites that allow users to directly connect with people they know socially (
Facebook,
MySpace,
Tagged) or professionally (
LinkedIn,
Xing). However, other social networking sites are built around common topics, with users connecting as they navigate to their specific interests (
Yahoo! Groups,
TripAdvisor,
FanNation) – or even real-time geographical locations, as sites are accessed through a mobile application (
FourSquare,
Loopt). Blogs (
WordPress,
Blogger) and “microblog” sites (
Twitter, Loopt) can also be considered social media, as each blogger uses their own sub-site to communicate with their followers. As the popularity of social networking has risen, a few sites that started out with a social focus have increasingly been deployed by companies for marketing and customer outreach (Facebook, Twitter).
One major impact of social media is that Internet users are increasingly demonstrating a general impulse toward participation with and contribution to websites. Some sites are leveraging this impulse to aggregate (and often to moderate or rate) a body of content (
YouTube,
Flickr,
Wikipedia,
AllRecipes,
eHow). Other sites help users make purchasing decisions by providing user-generated ratings of products or businesses (
Epinions,
Yelp). Still others promote philanthropy by encouraging site visitors to pool donations or investments to achieve a larger goal (
DonorsChoose,
Kiva). These diverse examples show how, like search engines and computer operating systems, social networking sites can function as economic “platforms” that serve different groups of many users, including consumers, advertisers, game developers, and others.
These issues arise in discussions of social networking:
- Social networking enables new ways to connect, share information, and do business –and these new forms of engagement have impacted culture and society.
- Data posted to these sites is often publicly available and may persist years into the future. Information a person shares online has the potential to damage that person’s own reputation later on – for example, in college applications or job interviews.
- The companies hosting these sites ultimately control the information users post. There is an ongoing debate on whether there should be limits on how these companies use and share information about individual users.
- As social networking sites are increasingly used by children and teens, and information posted online is immediately and easily shared, the potential for online bullying and the difficulty of ensuring child safety become greater concerns.
- Some social networking sites allow users to share audio, video, and written content; this may enable theft of copyrighted content.
- Some personal information shared on social networking sites may be publicly accessed and used in identity theft or even home break-ins.
TAP Academics researching social networking include:
Urs Gasser of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society writes about youth and social networking.
John Palfrey of Harvard Law School looks at Internet filtering, social networking, and other new media.
"What is different today is that the public spaces in which young people interact have expanded. Instead of interacting only in physical public spaces -- schoolyards, parks, malls -- much of the social life of young people takes place in a converged space that links the online and the offline."
From his article “Solutions Beyond the Law,
” The New York Times,
10/1/2010
James Grimmelmann of New York Law School writes about the law and policy of privacy on social network sites.
Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School examines how different national governments affect efforts to find and filter content online, including social networking sites.
These sources are a good place to start in understanding issues involving social networking. Anirban Sengupta and Anoshua Chaudhuri examine online harassment of teens in “
Are Social Networking Sites a Source of Harassment for Teens? Evidence from Survey Data.” James Grimmelmann offers an overview of the law and policy of privacy on social network sites in “
Saving Facebook.” Jonathan Zittrain explores the relationships among social networking sites and users in “
Facebook Rules: Privacy Invasions From Other Users.” Lorrie Faith Cranor and Sarah Spiekermann describe how to design privacy-friendly sites in “
Engineering Privacy.” Urs Gasser and John Palfrey look at bullying, safety, copyright, and privacy issues in “
Empowering Parents and Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape.”
Recent Developments
In January 2010, the FTC held its
second roundtable exploring privacy issues online, and discussed issues around social networking. Congress held hearings in February 2010 on “The Collection and Use of Information for Commercial Purposes.” Facebook made controversial changes to its privacy policy and advertising practices in the spring of 2010, with Senators subsequently sending a
formal notice of concern to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee followed up with
hearings in July investigating privacy problems with Google, Facebook, and AT&T.
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