A few years back, we noted an ethics opinion in Florida that stated that judges cannot be Facebook friends with lawyers who may appear before them in court. As we noted at the time, this seemed to go pretty far, as Facebook friends didn't mean "personal" friends, and there are lots of people who use Facebook just to connect with anyone they know. Furthermore, there are plenty of reasons why judges and lawyers might know each other through other paths as well. Either way, because of that opinion, a judge in Florida has been disqualified from a case for being Facebook friends with the prosecutor. The other party in the case sought to disqualify the judge claiming that on his Facebook, his "friends" were "only [his] closest friends and associates, persons whom [he] could not perceive with anything but favor, loyalty and partiality."

Oddly, as Venkat Balasubramani notes in the link above, the ruling to disqualify the judge did not focus on the facts around friendship, but around the claim that it's sort of announced publicly. As Venkat notes:

I'm still struggling to see how this is different from other forms of social interaction between lawyers and judges. Social interaction between judges and lawyers happens all the time and is not a basis for disqualification. I think there may be a bit of Facebook exceptionalism going on here.

Related to this, and at the same link, Eric Goldman points out that if we're weighing two different issues: (1) having a judge that understands Facebook and how social interaction commonly works today and (2) the "small possibility of apparent impropriety" it seems that having judges who understand social networking is a more important goal in today's society.

Jeff Roberts has the details of a ruling in which a judge said that if one of your friends shares your Facebook profile with the police, they haven't violated your 4th Amendment rights. This actually seems pretty straightforward and reasonable. Unlike some other recent rulings, this isn't a case where police are getting access to information that some others might have access to through other means. Individuals can share what they know with law enforcement, and if you reveal criminal activity to them, that's fair game. It seems like the real lesson here is, if you're (a) going to commit crimes and (b) brag about them on Facebook then (c) you should probably know who your friends are.

Personally, I've found that Facebook's "recommendations" of people I might know is kind of a mixed bag. Sometimes it reminds me of people I probably should be connected to, but other times it's pretty random. If I don't know the person, I might take a look at who we know in common, but I generally won't friend such people. Still, there are times when the recommendations might turn up something... interesting. Such is the case, apparently, with the woman who discovered that her husband was married to someone else after Facebook recommended his other wife to her, and she noticed the wedding photos in her profile. For what it's worth, the guy had left his first wife years earlier, and married the second wife after he'd moved out... but at no point had either the wife or husband moved towards getting a divorce. After trying to find out what was up by calling his mother, the guy showed up at wife number one's house promising to make things right if she didn't tell anyone. That didn't happen, and he's now facing bigamy charges. And people say Facebook isn't useful...

We recently wrote about a very questionable new state law in Missouri that made it illegal for teachers to friend "current or former students" on various social networks. This broad prohibition was targeted at the misuse of social networking by some teachers to have extremely inappropriate relationships with students. It's understandable why such situations get people upset, but overreacting by making it illegal for teachers to friend students is just ridiculous. Thankfully, a group of teachers have filed a lawsuit saying that the law violates their First Amendment rights, as well as some other rights. The teachers are saying that online communication has become an invaluable tool for helping students -- especially shy ones, and that this law will turn teachers into law-breakers to continue using useful communication services. Hopefully the law gets struck down, though the main sponsor of the bill continues to defend it.

It's become quite clear that the threat to children from sexual predators on the internet has been massively overhyped by the media looking for a juicy story and for politicians looking to take advantage of it. Studies have shown that the number of sexual offenses against kids has dropped while internet use has grown, and fewer kids are actually being targeted by predators. What's always been interesting throughout this long-running moral panic is that kids have been shown to actually be pretty savvy in dealing with strangers online, and that perhaps politicians give them far less credit than they deserve in these areas. As we've noted, teaching kids how to deal with dangers they might face online -- just as with dangers they might face in real life -- is a much better way to keep them safe than by searching for some legal or technological magic bullet to eradicate sex offenders and protect the children. Now, another study has emerged saying that kids talk to their friends, and not strangers, online. Kids' primary use of social networking sites isn't to try and meet new people, let alone strangers, but rather to keep up with their real-life friends. The stories of kids being lured in by online predators grab lots of attention, and such incidents are undoubtedly despicable, but it's important to also remember that they are relatively rare.

For many years, we've wondered about how new technologies may start to change the nature of friendship. In the past, friends would come and go over time, as friendships grew and receded during different stages of life for different reasons -- and that was fine. But in an age where everyone is connected electronically all of the time, and whether or not someone is a "friend" is a binary decision set at the click of a mouse, some are pointing out that it seems weird that social networks are setting up people to remain "friends" forever, even if they're not still friendly in real life.

Of course, it appears that much of this is actually mitigated by social norms and the rapid turnover of social networks. So, for example, while I've recently had many high school friends "refriend" me on Facebook, and I may chat briefly with those I really was friendly with, I pretty much ignore those that I barely knew. Sure they're on my "friend" list, but beyond that, it's rather inconsequential. But, more importantly, with social networks rising and falling rapidly, we seem to have a natural culling mechanism. So, all those friends I was connected to via SixDegrees and Friendster are meaningless now because I never use those services any more, and at some point the same will likely be true for Facebook.

Still, in the link above, Scott Brown does offer one amusing suggestion: a Facebook app that he calls the "Fade Utility." If there are "untended friends," they gradually fade from your friend list. Just like in real life.

There's already been a court ruling noting that being a Facebook friend is not like being a "real" friend, but the vast "cheapening" of the concept of friendship is ticking some people off. In noting how the various social networks keep encouraging you to add more friends (even if they're not real friends), it raises questions about whether or not these social networks are hurting their own reason for being. As businesses, they have every reason to encourage you to keep adding friends. However, if you so cheapen your relationships by adding anyone and everyone as a friend, doesn't it make the services a lot less useful for really keeping up with your friends? Perhaps social networks that are really about managing your relationship with real friends would be better off focusing on the quality of communication between friends, rather than the quantity of friends you have.

In what may be one of the most pointless studies done in quite some time, a research firm has discovered to its own amazement that people tend to trust their own friends more than well known bloggers. Well, I should certainly hope so. Were there really people out there who thought that folks with high trafficked blogs actually held more sway than a personal friend? This is really nothing more than a retread of a (much more academic) report back in January noting that so-called "influentials" don't really have very much influence. What that study found was that "word of mouth" works, but where those recommendations come from tend to be somewhat random. So things bubble up from everywhere, rather than starting with well-known bloggers. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone, but after a few years of ridiculous media coverage suggesting that top bloggers have influence, it's nice to see a few reminders that influence is a much more democratic system.

Turns out that your Facebook friends aren't necessarily real friends... under the law (at least in the UK). A UK judge has ruled that requesting to be a Facebook friend isn't the same as trying to become someone's real friend, which apparently matters in terms of harassment. The case concerned a woman who accused her ex-boyfriend of harassing her by requesting to be her friend on Facebook, but the judge apparently felt that since most people use Facebook and other social networks more as a list of acquaintances, it's hardly harassment to request to "friend" an ex.

This seems unlikely to come as a surprise to most people, but despite the number of tools and applications such as social networks for getting people to network with each other, the number of close friends that most people have hasn't really changed -- and it almost always involves people who have gotten to know each other face-to-face rather than online. This isn't particularly surprising or new, nor does it suggest that there's anything less real about online friends. It just confirms what pretty much everyone knows: while it's certainly possible to meet and get to know people quite well through online venues, meeting in person still has plenty of benefits -- especially for reaching a closer level of friendship.