French Law Forbids News From Mentioning Facebook, Twitter But Can Source Stories From Them.

techfreakstuff.com

DAMN, I THOUGHT THEY WERE BANNED FROM EVEN GETTING STORIES FROM THEM. YOU KNOW, LIKE THE STORIES WE FIND IN OUR PAPERS EVERY SUNDAY THAT ARE MORE TRYING TO MAKE A STORY THAN BREAK ONE…..

French television anchors are banned from mentioning specific social networking sites unless a story is about them die to a 1992 law, highlighting the difficulty of legislating in the Internet age.
The host of a news or talk show is not allowed to say, “Follow us on Twitter at” or “See our Facebook page,” because such statements fall afoul of a law intended to prevent product placement-type advertising. Instead, anchors must use generic terms like, “Find us on popular social networking sites.”

“Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition?” said Christine Kelly, spokesperson for France’s broadcast standards regulator, about the May 27 ruling.

In a world in which virtually all traditional media is increasingly interconnected with new media, especially social networking, the application of the law seems to put French broadcast networks at a disadvantage.

The situation also illustrates the difficulties of applying pre-Internet regulations to a post-Internet landscape. The well-intentioned 1992 law seeks to ensure that broadcast media — largely publicly funded in France and with strict advertising rules — is kept independent from marketing.

But lawmakers in the early 90s could never have imagined that private companies would, some 20 years later, become essential parts of the media conversation.

This application of the long-standing law has reportedly been widely criticized in the French blogosphere.