What is social network?

What next for the Social Network Users' Bill of Rights?

• Since the CFP Social Network Users' Bill of Rights was written last June, the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have helped highlight the importance of social networks for political purposes, the Commerce Department has called for an online Privacy Bill of Rights — and ongoing news stories like A Chinese Activist and Mark Zuckerberg’s Dog continue to spotlight many social network sites’ challenges with free speech, and pseudonymity.  With this year’s CFP scheduled for Washington DC in mid-June, what are the next steps? For more about the CFP Social Network Users' Bill of Rights, please see http://cfpconf.wetpaint.com/page/%23BillOfRights and 's 

• Answer:

  A few possibilities: get social network sites to adopt the concept of a Bill of Rights for their users and as many of the individual rights as they’re comfortable with.   Some of the specific rights are contentious  — for example, Facebook objected to  in their response last summer.  But more positively, Facebook’s current  â€œuser rights and responsibilities” document already covers many of these rights, and it would be great to have even partial support from them.  And sites like Twitter, http://tribe.net, and emerging companies that are trying to emphasize different values may be willing to go even farther. work with politicians in the US and elsewhere who are looking at protecting online, and encourage them to adopt the bill of rights framework and our specific language.  There’s a bit of “carrot and stick” combining this and the previous bullet: the threat of legislation  is great both for encouraging self-regulation and getting startups to look for a potential future strategic advantage by adopting strong user rights from the beginning. encourage broad participation to highlight where there’s consensus.  Currently, there are a couple of ways to weigh in: the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights site allows you to vote on the individual rights, and you can also vote for or against the entire bill via Twitter.  It would be great to have additional voting on other social network sites like Facebook, MySpace, Reddit to give the citizens of those “countries” a voice. collaborate with with groups like the Global Network Initiative, the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition, and the Association for Progressive Communications that support similar principles follow Gabrielle Pohl’s lead and translate into multiple languages to build awareness globally. take a more active approach with media outreach to call more attention to the campaign.  #privchat, the weekly Twitter chat sponsored  by Center for Democracy and Technology and Privacy Camp, is natural hub  for the discussion.