Social Media

Two employees of Gloucester County have filed a federal lawsuit against the county for adopting a social-media policy they say has a chilling effect on their First Amendment right to free speech. The suit, announced Thursday by the workers' union, says the scope of the county's policy, which includes Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging, is too broad. It was filed Monday by the firm of Weissman & Mintz in U.S. District Court on behalf of Vincent Gattuso, a traffic-signal electrician, and Michael Blaszczyk, a truck driver.

HAGERSTOWN, Md. - Maryland's prison agency said this week that it will no longer ask prospective correctional officers for the keys to their social media accounts after the American Civil Liberties Union complained that requiring job applicants to divulge Facebook user names and passwords violates privacy laws. Instead, background investigators will ask those seeking guard jobs and other security-related positions to voluntarily log in to their personal websites so that investigators can review them.

The night of Hurricane Sandy brought heartening stories of the power of social media to connect and inform. In social media terms, Sandy is without a doubt the most-covered storm, in depth, breadth, and detail, in history. On Aug. 30, 2005, when Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Facebook was a toddler of a year and a half, YouTube a babe of six months, and Twitter nonexistent. Most tweets, posts, and videos sought to help people, both those in storm's way and those wanting to know more.

The past two years have seen social-media revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere. They've seen social-media elections such as the U.S. presidential race just past. And now, in this week's eruption of hostilities between Israel and Hamas, we may be seeing a new kind of war. It's missiles and air attacks, bomb blasts, gunfire, and screams of agony. It's also tweets on Twitter and videos on YouTube. "Call it the first social media war," says Lawrence Husick, co-chairman for the Center on the Study of Terrorism at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

NEW YORK - Social TV was the buzz Wednesday on the famed set of Saturday Night Live . With the nation talking about tweets and tagging friends and other social-media jargon, NBCUniversal held a conference to showcase its social-media prowess. Highlights included the Bravo channel's "tweet tracker" and CNBC's 500,000 Twitter followers, which NBCU believes boost its relevance to TV fans and advertisers. The consensus was that social media have the potential, like Internet surfing and browsing in the 1990s and early 2000s, to radically alter the already-fragmented media industry.

The 2010 hurricane season, which began this month, is forecast to be a busy one. As relief workers respond to the storms, researchers at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Lab in Cherry Hill will track the situation - not through weather maps and TV reports, but through photos and messages on social-media websites. The lab is studying posts on tools such as Twitter and YouTube during disasters and political conflicts to answer some basic questions: Who is using them? And how?

The Gloucester County Board of Freeholders is scheduled to vote Wednesday on revising its social media policy for county employees in an effort to comply with a recent federal labor ruling. The policy, passed in a 5-2 vote last March, holds that employees must be "respectful" to the county and coworkers on sites such as Facebook and that "the use of social media to harass, threaten, libel, malign, or discriminate against" anyone associated with the county "will not be tolerated. " Violations can result in termination of employment.

PRETTY LITTLE LIARS. 8 tonight, ABC Family. LOS ANGELES - The curt antagonist on "Pretty Little Liars" - known only as "A" - terrorizes victims by way of text messages and the Internet. ABC Family is using the same weapons to lure its audience. The network is banking on Twitter's 140 characters and Facebook's "like"-ability to generate buzz and strengthen the fan base of the freshman series. And it doesn't end with social networking. Whether it's iPhone apps or text alerts, TV networks are finding that they have to keep up with an ever-changing social-media landscape to keep young viewers interested.

You can connect with lots of people on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and texts. Now, it seems, with the pope's blessing, you can use all these media to make the ultimate connection. On Jan. 24, the feast day of St. Francis de Sales - patron saint of journalists - Pope Benedict XVI issued a message titled "Truth, Proclamation, and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age. " He gave his blessing to the Facebook-Twitterverse, and invited Christians "to join the network of relationships which the digital era has made possible.

Modern technology makes our lives so much easier in so many ways - it even allows politicians to trade snide remarks without even being in the same room. To wit: Council members James F. Kenney and Bill Green, who have been willing to exchange snide remarks in person as well, engaged last week in that new phenomenon known as the Twitter fight. Using the social-media site, Green began the parlay by questioning Kenney's reasoning in an editorial on zoning "setbacks" for streams. (It's complicated, but Green basically suggested that Kenney was raising a concern that didn't exist.)