…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.
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