social media news from FierceGovernmentIT

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is using information gathered from social media monitoring when deciding how to respond to a disaster. While official assessments are more thorough, speed is Read more...

Count the FBI as yet another federal agency seeking to refine raw social media into intelligence gold. Among the things the FBI says could be extracted from the mountain of tweet streams, blogs and Read more...

A British juror was sentenced Jan. 23 to six months imprisonment in the United Kingdom for researching a defendant's past on the Internet during deliberations--a problem that although still rare, has Read more...

Increased swearing on Twitter could be a sign of societal discontent, says a study from the Rand Corp that analyzed an archive of Tweets from 2009 with the hash tag #IranElection. In a report Read more...

State governments can sign a modified YouTube terms of service agreement stripped of problematic legal clauses, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers announced Jan. 17. The Read more...

Terrorist groups use online social network sites to monitor military personnel and recruit new followers, says a new paper by a University of Haifa communications professor. Gabriel Weimann, in a Read more...

Government control of the Internet is a losing proposition and al Shabaab deserves "no sympathy" from efforts to remove it from Twitter, said a State Department official during a Jan. 10 online talk. Read more...

During the month of January the State Department will take five questions from the international Twitter community every Friday after its daily press briefing. The department fielded questions during Read more...

The Food and Drug Administration issued Dec. 27 draft guidance (.pdf) for pharmaceutical and medical device companies on the use of "emerging electronic media." FDA officials note that the guidance Read more...

The increasing pervasiveness of information filtering via social networks has implications for American democracy, said David Weinberger, a senior researcher with the Harvard Berkman Center for Read more...