SEARCH CLINIC

Doctors are being warned to take extra care when using social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
The British Medical Association guidance highlighted a series of potential pitfalls doctors face.

In particular, it said there was a risk the lines between personal and professional lives could be blurred.

It comes after a series of cases in which NHS staff and other public sector workers have got into trouble through their use of social media.

In 2009, a group of doctors and nurses were suspended for posting pictures of themselves on Facebook lying down in unusual places, including a hospital helipad.

And last year a civil servant found herself in the newspapers after using her Twitter account to make political points and saying she was struggling with a hangover.

Dr Tony Calland, chairman of the BMA’s medical ethics committee, said: “Medical professionals should be wary of who could access their personal material online, how widely it could be shared and how it could be perceived by their patients and colleagues.”

The guidance advises both doctors and medical students to adopt conservative privacy settings where they are available.

It also warns them against making informal or derogatory comments about patients or colleagues as well as not accepting current or past patients as friends on Facebook.

Dr Search warns that not only does Facebook have a number of personal security issues, but the lack of effective segmentation between types of friends, family and colleagues means the risk of cross data transfers are high.

Twitter’s UK audience jumped by a third in May 2011 following the Ryan Giggs super injunction leaks, which drove a huge number of female pensioners to the site.As a result of the Ryan Giggs super injunction row social media company Twitter enjoyed its highest ever UK audience last month, with 6.1 million British people visiting the site, up 34 per cent on April’s figures, says Nielsen-UKOM, a UK online measurement company.

Twitter’s monthly audience boost was helped by a 65 per cent increase in the number of over 50s men, aged between 50 to 64, accessing the site, and a doubling in the number of female pensioners (the over 65’s) going to Twitter.com to see the latest in the super-injunction row.

Both LinkedIn and Facebook also enjoyed record audience figures last month, also driven by a surge in their popularity amongst the over 50s age group.

During May 2011, 26.8 million Britons visited Facebook, which is the highest ever audience figure the social network has attracted in the UK, propelling it for the first time above MSN, Microsoft’s news and email hub, making it the second most popular site in the country behind Google.

According to the Nielsen-UKOM figures, LinkedIn registered 3.6 million visits during May 2011, up 57 per cent on the same month last year.

Two years ago in the UK the profile of Facebook’s audience was skewed towards 18 to 34 year olds. However, the number of 50 to 64 year olds visiting the site has grown 84 per cent in the last 24 months.

While the number of UK visitors to the three biggest social networks continues to rise, the amount of time these audiences are spending on these sites is more mixed.

The average visitor to Facebook and LinkedIn is spending a little longer on those sites each month than they were two years ago, while the average visitor to Twitter appears to be spending a little less.

The latest social media network UK traffic figures for May 2011 have just been released by Hitwise.From: Hitwise social media network uk traffic figures May 2011

The overall result is that traffic to both YouTube and Twitter has increased whilst Facebook’s dominance of social media has declined.

This month’s search and social analysis release confirmed some interesting trends in the Social Networking and Forums category, including a bumper month of traffic for Twitter, continuing growth for YouTube and a declining market share for Facebook.

Last month Hitwise noted the growth of YouTube and how the video website now accounts for 1 in every 5 visits to all social networking sites. In May YouTube continued its growth, accounting for 20.52% of all visits to the Social Networks and Forums category.

Meanwhile Twitter had its biggest month of traffic ever, in part because of the super-injunction revelations, but also because the micro-blogging platform has carved a niche for itself as an excellent platform through which Internet users can share and consume news.

Recent examples like the death of Osama Bin Laden, the Egypt crisis and the resurgence of the ash cloud have all been shared and discussed on Twitter.

What’s interesting is that the growth of YouTube and Twitter is coming at the expense of Facebook.

Since the beginning of 2011, Facebook’s market share of visits within the Social Networks and Forums category has fallen from nearly 58% to hover around the 54% mark.

Despite the drop in market share in recent months, Facebook needn’t panic. Although its market share is declining slightly, Facebook still commands over half of the visits to the fastest growing category online, and having a slightly smaller proportion of an ever increasing pie is still a very healthy place to be.

However, it does raise the question: has Facebook now finished its growth phase in the UK? This is something that Dr Search will continue to monitor closely over the coming months and confirms our blog post of a couple of days ago when I posted: Facebook faces saturation claims as growth stops

Faceboook monitoring site Inside Facebook suggests that during May Facebook has lost six million users in the US and 100,000 in the UK.Facebook has denied that it is losing customers, saying it is “pleased” with growth, but the social network- which does not usually comment on third party statistics questioned how it arrived at this figure.

Other net measurement firms said they had seen growth over the same period.

The figures from Inside Facebook also claimed that 1.5 million Canadian users left the social network in May.

But overall it showed that Facebook was growing, to a total of 687 million users worldwide with many new customers coming from countries such as India, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Its figures on customer leakage do not appear to tally with those from net measurement firm comScore.

According to comScore, the average amount of time spent on the site was also up, from 21 minutes per day in December 2009 to 25 minutes per day by December 2010.

The idea of Facebook fatigue, where users desert the social network after a certain period of time has long been talked about by experts but remains unproven.

In developed countries such as the US and the UK Facebook penetration is hitting 50% and at that level it is inevitable that users will sign up who aren’t frequent visitors.

From: http://www.insidefacebook.com/available-data-shows-facebook-user-numbers-growing-quickly-or-slowly-or-falling/

New research has shown that 13% of online adults use Twitter, and half of Twitter users access the service on a cell phone.

As of May 2011, 13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter.

That represents a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users the first time Pew Research asked their “stand-alone” question about Twitter adoption in November 2010.
For the first time in their May 2011 survey, they also included a follow-up question asking cell phone-owning Twitter users if they access the service on their phones and found that half (54%) access the service in this way.

Due to sample size limitations, they were unable to provide detailed statistics on mobile Twitter usage by different demographic groups.

Twitter usage by those ages 25-44 has grown significantly since late 2010
Although young adults continue to have relatively high rates of Twitter usage, the number of 30-49 year olds who use the service has doubled since late 2010 — from 7% of such users in November to 14% in May 2011.

This growth trend is especially pronounced among 25-34 year olds.

Twitter use for this cohort roughly doubled between November 2010 and May 2011, from 9% to 19%.

Although growth in Twitter use among internet users ages 35-44 was notable as well (from 8% in late 2010 to 14% in spring 2011).

By contrast, Twitter adoption over the same time period was stable among the youngest adults (those ages 18-24) who were the most likely to use the service in our first survey.

Pew’s research can be found at: http://pewresearch.org/twitter-users-demographics-research

Twitter has said it was prepared to hand over data and information identifying tens of thousands of people who have used the website to break privacy superinjunctions.A senior executive from Twitter has admitted for the first time that the social network might turn over information to authorities if it was “legally required” to do so.

Experts had previously assumed that people who breached gagging orders on Twitter were protected from legal reprisals because the website is outside the jurisdiction of British courts.

The admission came after Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General, warned earlier this week that people who breached injunctions online were in for a “rude shock”.

Ryan Giggs, the Premiership footballer, last week started legal proceedings against Twitter and “persons unknown” after more than 70,000 users revealed that he had obtained an injunction to hide an extra-marital affair.

On Monday John Hemming, the back-bench Liberal Democrat MP, used parliamentary privilege to identify Giggs in Parliament.

The admission by Twitter, however, could encourage legal action by a number of celebrities who have been named on the website as having obtained injunctions to hide alleged affairs.

Tony Wang, Twitter’s head of European operations, has said that the website would notify users in advance so they could fight the application in the court before Twitter handed over the information.

He said: “Platforms have a responsibility, not to defend that user but to protect that user’s right to defend him or herself.

“If we’re legally required to turn over user information, to the extent that we can, we want to notify the user involved, let them know and let them exercise their rights under their own jurisdiction.

“That’s not to say that they will ultimately prevail, that’s not to say that law enforcement doesn’t get the information they need, but what it does do is take that process into the court of law and let it play out there.”

When Mr Hemming named Giggs earlier this week he said: “With about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs on Twitter, it is obviously impracticable to imprison them all.”

Dr Search wonders if it will possible to trace the anonymous users if they have used fake email addresses and set up Twitter accounts in internet cafes as tracking the culprits will be very vague- especially as the most controversial Twitter account appears to have been posted to on only one day.

Twitter’s growth just keeps on going, reaching another new peak in UK Internet traffic last weekend on Saturday 21 May.

Twitter experienced its highest ever volume of online traffic on Saturday, accounting for 0.54% of all UK Internet visits that day, or to put it in simpler terms: Twitter was responsible for 1 in every 184 Internet visits in the UK on Saturday.Twitter has been constantly in the news- mainly because Twitter has carved a niche for itself as an excellent platform through which Internet users can share and consume news.

Twitter’s success is based on it’s three key attributes- it’s free, quick and easy to use.

It’s the simplicity and the keyword focus of the social media website which makes it so successful

The political revolution in Egypt, the Japanese earthquake and the celebrity super-injunctions are just three big news stories from the last few months that have been shared, spread and commented on through Twitter.

Within the growth of Twitter, 12% of visits to the website are coming from new users.

To put that into context, 99.5% of visits to Facebook in the UK come from returning visitors, but Twitter continues to attract new users to its website every single day.

Facebook is clearly much bigger than Twitter (about 15 times bigger in terms of volume of visits) but Facebook’s growth in terms of new visitors (in the UK market at least) has been pretty static for some months now.

As Twitter continues its extraordinary growth, one thing that is interesting is that the micro-blogging platform is becoming more mainstream in terms of its user base.

Using Mosaic we can see the types of people that visit Twitter online.You can see that visits to Twitter in May 2011 (the red line) are much closer to the UK online population average (the blue line) than they were in May 2010 (the green line).

In particular Twitter relies less on visits from Liberal Opinions, New Homemakers and Upper Floor Living – groups which are characterised as young, mostly single people who like their gadgets.

Twitter is no longer purely in the domain of early-adopters; rather it is becoming a universal tool which is being used increasingly by all types of Internet users, regardless of their online preferences.

Original research by Hitwise

Wikipedia’s boss Jimmy Wales has entered the debate over the UK’s superinjunctions claiming current privacy laws are a human rights violation.The online encyclopaedia has fallen foul of UK privacy law in recent weeks, with details about those using super injunctions appearing on the site.

Mr Wales said that such information would be removed because it did not come from a reliable source, however he said that might change if the stories ran in foreign newspapers.

Mr Wales said his personal view was that privacy laws were “grave injustices and human rights violations”.

Wikipedia is owned by the US-based charity the WikiMedia Foundation and and is therefore subject to US law.

That is the same legal loophole that has allowed Twitter to continue publishing details about the private lives and subsequent super injunctions of a range of celebrities.

It has said it will not identify the user who has been exposing the super injunction people on the site, despite the fact that some of the details appear to be untrue.

Experts warned that the lawyers of celebrities could turn the tables, pressing for ISPs and firms such as Twitter to hand over the details of who is publishing comments on the site.

To do so they would need to obtain what is known as a Norwich Pharmacal order from a judge, the same process used by rights holders to force ISPs to hand over details about alleged illegal file-sharers.

The legislative net also appears to be closing in on social media sites with the UK culture secretary Jeremy Hunt saying places such as Twitter “made a mockery” of privacy laws.

Meanwhile Twitter continues to ride high on the furore, recording its busiest day of online traffic last week.

In what has been described as the “Spycatcher moment” of the internet era, a single user of Twitter has brought the culture of the superinjunction into disrepute by getting over 61,000 followers to a list of six celebrities alleged to have links with the controversial gagging orders.The frenzy of activity on Twitter yesterday makes the super-injunctions as ineffective as the ban placed on publication of the autobiography of the MI5 officer Peter Wright in the mid 1980s.

The ban on Spycatcher was lifted in 1988 when the law lords realised that overseas publication of the book made a gagging restriction pointless.

A mystery Twitter user whose online identity cannot be revealed for legal reasons posted half a dozen tweets in quick succession, with the implication that each of the named celebrities was the subject of a super-injunction. Ironically, the story took off when Jemima Khan, who was wrongly included on the list, sent out her own tweets to her more than 60,000 followers alerting them to the “untrue and upsetting” rumours.

She described as a “bloody nightmare” the fact that she had been falsely linked to an “injunction” which the mystery tweeter had claimed had been taken out by Jeremy Clarkson banning mention of intimate photographs of the pair. Ms Khan warned that “my sons will be bullied at school because of it” and later told her followers that Mr Clarkson and his wife Frances had sent her supportive texts, dismissing rumours of the existence of such photographs.

Rumours surrounding the identities of those who have taken out super-injunctions have circulated on Twitter and other websites for weeks but the speed with which the latest accusations have been publicised has taken the issue to a critical juncture.

Last night, the media lawyer Mark Stephens predicted that the manner in which information had been shared on Twitter would dissuade further celebrities from taking out similar gagging orders. “It’s the beginning of the end. Even a rather thick footballer is going to think twice before handing £100,000 to a greedy lawyer if the greedy lawyer can’t guarantee that it will actually stay secret,” he said.

He compared yesterday’s developments to the Spycatcher case in which newspapers had sent journalists to New York to buy copies of the book. Business travellers and tourists followed suit. “In the end anyone who had a friend visiting America was placing an order and they were coming in by the box load,” said Mr Stephens, recalling why the ban was lifted. “We are in exactly the same territory [with the Twitter case] only much, much further in because 55,000 people is a large premiership ground full of people all telling the people they know.”

During the Spycatcher ban, the Daily Mirror published a front page with pictures of Britain’s senior judges and the headline “You fools”. The Economist published a blank page with an apology to its British readers for the absence of a review that had been printed in all its other editions. “The law is an ass,” the apology concluded.

Yesterday, the prostitute who slept with an actor whose name is protected by a super-injunction claimed she knew of another high-profile figure with three gagging orders against separate women. Helen Wood, 23, told Victoria Derbyshire on BBC Radio 5 Live: “There’s a list as long as my arm of men who have injunctions out on girls. There are injunctions going on everywhere.”

The Twitter outburst comes ahead of a report on the use of super-injunctions, due to be published next month by a committee led by the Master of the Rolls.

The disclosures exclusively referred to cases of a sexual nature, and could be damaging for those who are defending freedom of expression for the media at a time when British judges have been accused of introducing a privacy law through their interpretation of human rights legislation.

Padraig Reidy, news editor of Index on Censorship, commented that many Twitter users were critical of the prurient nature of the cases linked to injunctions. “If privacy vs freedom of expression issues are simply reduced to who is sleeping with whom, we lose sight of the more important cases where there is a real need for whistle-blowing, and acceptable breaches of privacy where there is a strong public interest.”

By last night, Twitter, which is reluctant to delete any posts from its site, had still not disabled the account at the centre of the row. But, according to Mr Stephens, the author of the tweets was likely to face serious punishment. Those who have been wrongly identified may sue for libel. In other cases, retribution will be taken by the courts. “The person who has committed this contempt of court will be best advised to take their toothbrush because they will probably be going to Pentonville jail,” he said. “Their emails used to upload this information are being traced, I imagine, as we speak.”

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/a-legal-crisis-in-140-characters-2281582.html

The raid that killed Osama Bin Laden was unwittingly announced first on Twitter.An IT consultant, living in Abbottabad, unknowingly tweeted details of the US-led operation as it happened.

Sohaib Athar http://twitter.com/ReallyVirtual wrote that a helicopter was hovering overhead shortly before the assault began and said that it might not be a Pakistani aircraft.

He only became aware of the significance of his tweets after President Obama announced details of Bin Laden’s death.

Mr Athar’s first posting on the subject came at around 1am local time (9pm BST).

He wrote: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”

Soon after, he reported the sound of an explosion, now known to have been US forces blowing up their damaged helicopter.

“A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S”

Throughout the raid, Mr Athar was drawing on information from friends in the local area who were also online.

Already this is being described as another huge day for the micro-blogging service.

“Twitter just had its CNN moment”, as one American website put it, comparing this event with the first Gulf War, where millions suddenly woke up to the fact that cable news was the place to observe a war unfold in real-time.

Such is the power of this media network that it has become the key resource for older media trying to stay ahead of events. A journalist who does not use Twitter is now like one who ignores the mobile phone.

“The few people online at this time of the night are saying one of the copters was not Pakistani…”

“People are saying it was not a technical fault and it was shot down. I heard it CIRCLE 3-4 times above, sounded purposeful.”

US officials stated that the raid took less than 40 minutes, but Mr Athar said there was still a military presence in the area two hours later.

“And now, a plane flying over Abbottabad…”

In his Twitter biography, Sohaib Athar describes himself as: “An IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops.”

He also said that he was not surprised to be the only person writing about events as they happened.

“I’ve been tweeting for about 5, 6 years, and been tweeting about Abbottabad because no one really talks about it. In fact, not many people use Twitter here. Everyone uses Facebook,” he said.

In the five years since Twitter was created, it has played a growing role in the reporting of world events.

The first glimpse that many people had of the site’s potential was in 2009 when a US Airways plane made an emergency landing on New York’s Hudson.

Ferry passenger Janis Krums tweeted a picture of the stricken aircraft, moments after it came down.

More recently, Twitter has been hailed as a catalyst in making world events happen. Earlier this year during the Egyptian uprising, which led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak, it was widely referred to as the “Twitter Revolution”.