Social Media Saturday: Facebook Lawsuit Proceeds in Europe, Twitter Struggles with Content Issues, and Vine Opens Up
This week in social media, Twitter continued to wrestle with disturbing user content, the European privacy lawsuit against Facebook takes its first big step, and Vine finally opened up its video service in a big way.
It's time for Social Media Saturday!
Facebook: European Privacy Lawsuit Proceeds
A few weeks ago, we reported on a privacy lawsuit in Europe against Facebook that was seeking other fed up Facebook users to join in what is effectively an Austrian class action against the company for violating users' privacy rights. The hitch for the Austria-based organization was that they needed people to volunteer to join the suit, because laws don't allow for a class in a class action suit to automatically be assigned.
So at the time, it seemed like a stretch for this particular suit to take off, but the suit is now proceeding with about 60,000 people total having signed up so far, according to Tech Crunch. In addition, the Vienna Regional Court, where the privacy lawsuit was originally filed, has reviewed the case and has given Facebook a month to respond, though the company probably has up to eight weeks before it's forced to make a move.
Twitter: Wrestling with Content, Free Speech, and Censorship
As we mentioned last week after the most active and heated week in Ferguson, Missouri, Twitter has been wrestling with what is essentially a classic news/editorial dilemma: How much of the unadorned truth do we show on the network, and where do we draw the line?
Last week, we began to see Twitter take a more active role in editing, censoring, and suspending accounts in response to dangerous or offensive tweets -- in particular, after a few days of a hacktivist Anonymous account subjecting the family of Ferguson's police chief to abuse and attacks on their privacy, Twitter finally drew the line and suspended the account when it publicized the (wrong) name of the supposed shooter of Mike Brown.
This week, Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo announced that the company is "actively suspending accounts" that were sharing the graphic imagery of the terrorist group ISIS beheading U.S. captive journalist James Foley. This came a day after Twitter spokesperson Nu Wexler announced the company would remove images of deceased loved ones if family members requested, a policy which stemmed from yet another recent free-versus-offensive speech controversy on the social network, when Robin Williams' daughter Zelda was subjected to abuse from Twitter trolls.
Vine: Now Any Video Can Become a Vine
Twitter staffers must be jealous of their colleagues over at Vine, which by stark contrast has remained relatively controversy-free this month and has now introduced an update that Vine users and newbies will both love.
In what is one of the most significant changes to the 6-second video service ever, Vine now allows users to import pre-existing videos and edit them into Vine clips, according to Forbes. Until this update, Vine users had to shoot a Vine video from scratch using the app; now they can shoot video on their phones without even thinking about Vine, and still turn that footage into a viral loop later on. Who knows how creative Vines will get, now that users can take their time amassing video and editing it down.
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