Matt Heath's List: Online Etiquette

• Unfriending The Enemy
• Unfriending The Enemy
• Unfriending The Enemy
• Vol. 180, Issue 17
• 10/22/2012
• Steinmetz, Katy, Time,
• Unfriending The Enemy
• Politics overload drives Facebook users to cut ties
• Chris Adamson
• didn't mind that most of his Facebook friends are überliberal -- until this election season.
• noticed a stream of less-than-subtle posts invading his News Feed.
• one of his buddies pledged to post every single day in an effort to understand "why his friends could possibly vote for" Mitt Romney.
• I don't even want to participate in anymore," Adamson says.
• Politics, classic etiquette tells us, is a subject best avoided when friends come to dinner. It may be time to amend that advice to include Facebook.
• Though social networking played a big role in the 2008 race
• Facebook has grown tenfold; it just hit 1 billion monthly users worldwide.
• Today's bigger friend groups are also more diverse, which makes it easier to offend.
• Some Facebookers have decided just to sever the online ties.
• blocking a person's updates from your News Feed so you don't see their posts unless you go looking for them.
• less drastic
• John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University in New Jersey, observes in an article for CyberPsychology & Behavior that
• Political oversharing is facilitated by what psychologists call the Internet's disinhibition effect.
• people feel emboldened by the lack of real-time response and the sense that the things they do online are less serious than actions in the real world. We get on the Web, and "out spills rude language and harsh criticisms, anger, hatred, even threats," Suler writes.
• guidelines for dealing with politics on Facebook.
• "Sharing what you like is generally better than sharing what you don't," says Anna Post,
• now that many people can count everyone from close friends to crazy uncles to far-flung professional contacts among their Facebook friends,
• it's important to keep the whole audience in mind,
• The original rule about politics and conversation, after all, was about having consideration for others' feelings.
• Estimates say there are about three negative Facebook posts about Romney and Obama for every positive mention
• By Katy Steinmetz
• © Time Inc., 2012

29 more annotations...

• HAYWARD, JOHN, Human Events, 00187194, 8/6/2012, Vol. 68, Issue 29
• Cyberstalking Case Raises First Amendment Questions
• The way the Washington state law is written, it could end up criminalizing things like posting a negative review on a website like Yelp, the website that accumulates amateur reviews of local businesses from happy, and unhappy, patrons.
• The amazing convenience of Internet communication has revolutionized American life in numerous ways, but it's also made it much easier for creeps to harass people.
• tragic 2006 suicide of Missouri teenager Megan Meier-after a bizarre online bullying incident
• galvanized regulatory efforts to protect people from "cyberstalking."
• These legal protections have, inevitably, come into conflict with the First Amendment.
• cyberstalking suit filed in Washington state
• test the boundaries of online free speech
• creating a falsified profile with a dating website
• three obscenity-laced comments
• using the online dating pseudonym
• a "nutcase" and "whack-job."
• "it outlaws anonymous or obscene speech intended to 'embarrass'
• cyberstalking law
• comments from visitors are invited
• Website proprietors have complete control over their public message areas-they can easily delete or edit offensive posts, ban annoying visitors, or even shut down public comments entirely.
• Cyberstalking laws could easily be twisted into weapons of harassment themselves.

16 more annotations...