Social Media & The Law — things to remember
1. Verifying pages and accounts: Although it’s not possible to ask Facebook, Twitter, et. al. to award your accounts and pages “verified” status, they’ll often consider such requests if you can prove that somebody is impersonating your company for commercial reasons. Don’t just file an impersonation complaint, but ask for your account to be verified for your users’ benefit and to avoid similar issues in the future. Who knows, you may be lucky.
2. Prepare ahead of time: Reporting copyright, intellectual property violations, and imposter accounts takes time and effort. Be prepared by having the reporting procedures for the various platforms readily available and the standard letters and emails written and saved as templates.
3. Consider watermarking: It’s time-consuming watermarking pictures you’re posting to your various social networks, but ultimately it’s worthwhile doing so, because it’ll stop others using them to impersonate you. There are many tools available that can help you to quickly put watermarks on your visual content.
4. Do your part: Make sure that your (potential) guests and visitors know about your official social media accounts, by displaying them clearly on your website and, where possible, linking them to your website (e.g. Pinterest can give you a verification link to include in the code of your website).
5. Understand the TOS: It’s much easier to file successful take down reports with the various platforms, if you understand their terms of service and know what is allowed, what isn’t, and how to complain. Take some time to read through the various TOS and bookmark the links to them, so you can find them again in a jiffy.
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