After dealing with a couple of fake accounts impersonating my company, I started to wonder about laws protecting social media users and tech companies. With new technologies, we need more solid rules governing how we use them. Common sense generally does very well in weeding out ridiculous things, but just as we think ridiculous, there are people doing exactly those outrageous things we think people with common sense would never do (like pretending to be a company’s customer support, for example. Why would you even do that…?)

After some research, I came across this Bloomberg Blog that has some pretty decent blog posts concerning law and social media. Unfortunately these seem to be written for the laymen so I couldn’t get much insight into how exactly have laws changed to accommodate the rise of social media – or if they have changed at all? There are so many grey zones now, sometimes I am also not entirely sure if what someone is doing is wrong. For things like copyright or trademark violation, it is often not too difficult to track down. However, for example, if someone impersonates another person, just a very regular person, how on earth are you going to prove that you are that person?

Perhaps one part of very basic literacy is to lay down exactly what you really shouldn’t be doing on social media…anonymity (or even not anonymity) sometimes makes people feel like they can do anything to anyone because it’s so virtual and perhaps as a result feel so reversable.