Briton wins social-site libel case

This is a social-networking legal first. A British high court awarded a man named Mathew Firsht 22,000 pounds (nearly $44,000) in damages from a fake profile and group about him on Facebook, according to a report in MSNBC. The group, called “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?”, and imposter profile reportedly were created by a former school friend. The profile contained "false claims about [Firsht's] sexuality, religion and political views, the Financial Times reports. According to MSNBC, "the information stayed on the site for 16 days until Firsht's brother spotted it. Firsht alerted Facebook staff who deleted the pages and told his lawyers they had been posted on the site from a computer at Raphael's home."

Canada's reax to Web 2.0...

...are just as largely ignorant as US ones, it's a little comforting to know. The latest response in Canada, in this case to Facebook, was an announcement from the Ontario government last week "that it was banning access to the site for thousands of bureaucrats and elected officials," law professor Michael Geist writes in the Toronto Star. "While the merits of Facebook are open to debate – some love it, others hate it, and many simply do not understand what the fuss is about – there should be no debating the fact that many of these policy responses are unnecessary, knee-jerk reactions to an emerging social phenomenon that is poorly understood." Since Facebook started allowing regional, not just college, university, and high school networks of users, it has grown from 8 million users last summer to about 21 million now, according to Professor Geist, with Toronto as the service's largest regional network in the world. Canada's recent "backlash," Geist says, seems to be centered around "derogatory" comments in Facebook profiles (often called "cyberbullying") and "workplace productivity." But mindless banning has its own negative impact, he suggests: "The attempts to block Facebook or punish users for stating their opinions fails to appreciate that social network sites are simply the Internet generation's equivalent of the town hall, the school cafeteria, or the workplace water cooler – the place where people come together to exchange both ideas and idle gossip." I wish I was seeing this view in more news reports around the world.