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December 12, 2011
Fear and Loathing on Russian Facebook.
More Big Ones from Mom-and-Pop Russia. Here's a headline you don't see every day. See at MSNBC "Angry Facebook Backlash After Medvedev Announces Russia Election Inquiry". Dang. Excerpt:
He [President Medvedev] announced the inquiry on Facebook--the same site used by organizers of mass rallies in Moscow and St. Petersburg on Saturday--that called for the elections to be annulled and rerun. The protests were Russia's biggest opposition rallies since Putin rose to power in 1999.
Within hours, Medvedev received one insult after another on the social media website from people who made clear his response to the demonstrations was insufficient.
NBC correspondent Stephanie Gosk said the majority of the 12,000 comments were negative – a remarkable act of open defiance in a country where political activists are jailed and hostility to the government would have been unusual only a few weeks ago.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Is law developing to make Gaming the Net actionable?
The End of Cyber Creeps? No one wants to chill speech. And last week's opinion and jury verdict in Obsidian Finance v. Cox (D.C. Or.) may not be black-letter law perfect. (Despite Cox's post-trial comments that she can't pay the $2.5 million verdict against her, watch for some serious interest in and help with her appeal.) But something new if tricky might grow out of Obsidian and other extreme cases like it. Bloggers of the on-line hater and notes-from-the-underground persuasion may no longer have the luxury of what I call "Cartooning": (1) purposely attempting to mar reputations of non-public plaintiffs through malicious, bad and incomplete "reporting" in non-hot news scenarios and (2) manipulating the Net to make sure tabla rasa humans or those with no axe to grind see it. Do see in Forbes by Kashmir Hill (she handles a very difficult bit of news and its issues deftly) "Why An Investment Firm Was Awarded $2.5 Million After Being Defamed By Blogger". Lots of relief in these cases could come from the common law of nearly all (about 45) of the American states. Now, let's see. What were those four categories of defamation per se again? And the elements of false light privacy? And...
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Posted by JD Hull at 08:36 PM | Comments (3)