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A Dispute Over Who Owns a Twitter Account Goes to Court

How much is a tweet worth? And how much does a Twitter follower cost?

In base economic terms, the value of individual Twitter updates seems to be negligible; after all, what is a Twitter post but a few bits of data sent caroming through the Internet? But in a world where social media’s influence can mean the difference between a lucrative sale and another fruitless cold call, social media accounts at companies have taken on added significance.

The question is: Can a company cash in on, and claim ownership of, an employee’s social media account, and if so, what does that mean for workers who are increasingly posting to Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus during work hours?

A lawsuit filed in July could provide some answers.

In October 2010, Noah Kravitz, a writer who lives in Oakland, Calif., quit his job at a popular mobile phone site, Phonedog.com, after nearly four years. The site has two parts — an e-commerce wing, which sells phones, and a blog.

While at the company, Mr. Kravitz, 38, began writing on Twitter under the name Phonedog_Noah, and over time, had amassed 17,000 followers. When he left, he said, PhoneDog told him he could keep his Twitter account in exchange for posting occasionally.

The company asked him to “tweet on their behalf from time to time and I said sure, as we were parting on good terms,” Mr. Kravitz said by telephone.

And so he began writing as NoahKravitz, keeping all his followers under that new handle. But eight months after Mr. Kravitz left the company, PhoneDog sued, saying the Twitter list was a customer list, and seeking damages of $2.50 a month per follower for eight months, for a total of $340,000.

PhoneDog Media declined to comment for this article except for this statement: “The costs and resources invested by PhoneDog Media into growing its followers, fans and general brand awareness through social media are substantial and are considered property of PhoneDog Media L.L.C. We intend to aggressively protect our customer lists and confidential information, intellectual property, trademark and brands.”

Mr. Kravitz said the lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court in the Northern District of California, was in retaliation for his claim to 15 percent of the site’s gross advertising revenue because of his position as a vested partner, as well as back pay related to his position as a video reviewer and blogger for the site.

The lawsuit, though, could have broader ramifications than its effect on Mr. Kravitz and the company.

“This will establish precedent in the online world, as it relates to ownership of social media accounts,” said Henry J. Cittone, a lawyer in New York who litigates intellectual property disputes. “We’ve actually been waiting to see such a case as many of our clients are concerned about the ownership of social media accounts vis-á-vis their branding.”

Mr. Cittone added that a particularly important wrinkle is what value the court might set on the worth of one Twitter follower to a media company, saying the price set could affect future cases involving ownership of social media.

“It all hinges on why the account was opened,” he said.

“If it was to communicate with PhoneDog’s customers or build up new customers or prospects, then the account was opened on behalf of PhoneDog, not Mr. Kravitz. An added complexity is that PhoneDog contends Mr. Kravitz was just a contractor in the related partnership/employment case, thus weakening their trade secrets case, unless they can show he was contracted to create the feed.”

These situations are likely to arise more often as social media tools like Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook continue to become a way for company representatives and customer service employees to interact with fans and irate customers.

JetBlue, for example, often answers customer queries via Twitter, although its official policy is to not respond to “formal complaints” on Twitter.

Other issues may arise when companies hire popular Twitter users partly because of their social media presence. For example, Samsung Electronics hired the outspoken blogger Philip Berne to review phones for the company internally.

Mr. Berne uses his personal Twitter account but often posts explicitly about Samsung products and his opinions on the phones he has tested. He cleared his Twitter account with the Samsung public relations department, he said, and he owns it.

“Their stance was that I am entitled to have and express an opinion, but I am not a Samsung representative, and I should make it clear that any opinions are my own and not those of my employer,” Mr. Berne said. In general, social media experts advise companies to tread with caution when it comes to account ownership.

Sree Sreenivasan, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School and the author of Sree’s Social Media Guide, said smart companies let social media blossom where it may.

“It’s a terrible thing to say you have to leave your Twitter followers behind,” he said, talking specifically about media companies that may employ popular Twitter writers. “It sends a terrible signal to reporters and journalists who care about this, and this will make it less attractive to recruit the next round of people.”

He said that many industries had policies that required sales staff to leave their Rolodexes behind, but that these policies were as relevant to social media as Rolodexes are to the modern office. After all, social media accounts are, almost by definition, personal.

He also said that the average Twitter account had less clout than many might think.

“The value of the individual users is very hard to quantify,” he said. “It’s dangerous to overestimate the value of an account to an organization and underestimate what it means for an individual.”

Mr. Kravitz said he was confused.

“They’re suing me for over a quarter of a million dollars,” he said. “From where I’m sitting I held up my end of the bargain.”

Bankruptcy Filing Raises Doubts About a Bond Repayment Pledge

Birmingham, Ala., is in Jefferson County, Alabama's most populous county. The county's debt totals $4.1 billion.

People who own what is considered the safest type of municipal bond may be in for a surprise.

This safe debt, called a general-obligation bond, is said to be the next strongest thing to Treasuries because it is backed by a “full faith and credit” pledge. That means the government that issued it will pay it on time, no matter what.

But now Jefferson County, Ala., has stopped paying such debt, breaking with convention and setting up a fundamental test of what full faith and credit truly means.

“We all want to know, ‘What’s the truth here?’ ” said Richard A. Ciccarone, chief research officer at McDonnell Investment Management. “The way I learned it, full faith and credit was considered all the taxing power of a community, and that means there’s an infinite pledge. When you get into bankruptcy court, truth is something that can be revealed in a new way.”

Jefferson County filed the biggest Chapter 9 bankruptcy in United States history last month, raising new uncertainty about the safest municipal bonds. Court precedent offers few answers. Municipal bankruptcies are rare, and most have involved tiny, special-purpose districts that did not even have general-obligation bonds, having issued revenue bonds, which are considered riskier because they guarantee repayment solely from money generated by a specific project like a toll road.

The few places that have gone bankrupt with general obligations outstanding have sent reassuring signals, making payments even though they were not required to in bankruptcy. Orange County, Calif., the previous Chapter 9 record-holder, took a few extra months to pay some maturing debt, but it compensated investors for the delay by giving them almost a full percentage point more interest than it otherwise owed them.

The small city of Central Falls, R.I., has been duly paying its general-obligation debtholders in Chapter 9 this year, bolstered by a new state law giving those investors priority over everybody else.

Jefferson County, by contrast, is taking advantage of the automatic stay granted in bankruptcy, which bars creditors from demanding payments or grabbing collateral. Officials say they stopped sending cash to the county’s paying agent in November and will not send any money this month, either.

Bankruptcy experts have long known that in theory a municipality could use the stay to revoke its full faith and credit pledge, but they have not watched a big distressed city or county go through with it. “You’ve got a case here where the rubber has hit the road,” said Kenneth N. Klee, a bankruptcy lawyer representing Jefferson County, whose debt grew out of poorly conceived efforts to finance a court-ordered rebuilding of its sewer system.

The county’s nonpayment is not its only surprise. Like many places, it used newfangled instruments to circumvent constitutional limits on how much debt it could legally issue. In Alabama, counties are required to hold a referendum before issuing any general-obligation bonds. So Jefferson County has not issued such bonds since the 1950s. Instead, it issues warrants, which look nearly identical but do not require the referendum.

Official disclosures promote the county’s warrants as “general obligations,” toward which “its full faith and credit have been irrevocably pledged.” Sounds good, but what does it really mean? Conventional wisdom has it that if a government defaults on a general obligation, its creditors can take it to court, where the judge will order it to raise taxes — as much as it takes, no matter how painful.

But that now appears to be a hollow threat in Jefferson County. Counties in Alabama do not have the legal authority to raise taxes. Only the state can do that.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty, generally, about what full faith and credit means,” said David A. Skeel Jr., a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “There’s a whole debate about whether these obligations are ever enforceable. And this is even apart from the weird situation you’re referring to, where the county is pledging its full faith and credit but doesn’t really have the ability to do that.”

Mr. Klee, the county’s bankruptcy lawyer, said about 40 percent of America’s counties appear to be in the same boat, issuing full faith and credit debt even though they have no legal authority to raise taxes, as the term implies.

In Jefferson County, Alabama’s most populous, which includes Birmingham, officials say they had to stop paying even their general obligations because they were draining the cash they needed for essential services.

“Jefferson County made a very different decision than Rhode Island did,” Mr. Klee said. “Rhode Island put bondholders ahead of its citizens, and Jefferson County is not going to do that.”

He called the notion that a full faith and credit pledge was inviolate, and that a debtor must honor it even in bankruptcy, “a myth and a scare tactic.”

“It’s a very reasonable step on the part of the county commissioners to conserve the money to deal with the crisis within the county,” he said, adding that he hoped that in the end the general-obligation debtholders would be paid in full, but he did not know if there was enough money. Finding out could take years.

Most of Jefferson County’s $4.1 billion of debt is, in fact, the revenue type, which does not raise such profound questions because investors know that type can default.

The big question is the general obligations, and the debtlike devices — warrants in Jefferson County’s case — that look like general-obligation debt but turn out to be something else upon closer inspection. The county has a smaller amount, roughly $200 million, of that type outstanding. A little more than half of it, $105 million, had a payment due in November. But that is when Jefferson County filed for bankruptcy, so it invoked the automatic stay and stopped sending the cash.

So far, there has been no outcry because those payments were due to just two financial institutions, JPMorgan Chase and Bayerische Landesbank. Both have been following the events in Jefferson County closely and were not caught by surprise.

But come April, another group of investors is owed a payment on a separate batch of general-obligation warrants worth about $96 million.

County officials said they do not know who holds that debt, but believe some are individual investors, who could be stunned to find themselves caught short after being told they were buying the county’s best paper.

That group of warrants is insured by a unit of MBIA, but it is unclear what would happen if investors filed a claim.

Other insurers, with policies on the county’s revenue debt, have already sued JPMorgan, Jefferson County’s lead underwriter, accusing it of committing improprieties and failing to disclose an engineering report that said early on that the county was getting in over its head.

Mr. Klee said that if investors were shocked to find their supersafe debt could stop paying, they should blame the banks and bond professionals who sold it to them without explaining what could happen in the event of a bankruptcy. He also suggested they take their complaints to the Alabama State Legislature and ask it to appropriate the money to service the debt.

But that could be a lost cause in the age of “no new taxes” and Occupy Wall Street. The State Legislature is averse to backstopping Jefferson County, either as an act of fiscal irresponsibility or a backdoor bailout for the banks.

“The issue of full faith and credit,” Mr. Klee said, “is whose full faith and credit?”

European Bank in Strong Move to Loosen Credit

Mario Draghi, the central bank's president, second from left, had resisted calls to stand directly behind debtor governments by buying their bonds as necessary, without limit.

After long resisting the kind of financial force Washington used at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, European central bankers on Wednesday pumped nearly $640 billion into the Continent’s banking system. The move raised hopes that the money could alleviate the region’s credit squeeze.

Though it is too soon to gauge any longer-term benefits, the move, by the European Central Bank, could be a turning point in the Continent’s debt crisis — a cascading problem that for nearly two years has plagued financial markets around the world and now threatens global economic growth.

American officials and global economists have long urged the Europe’s central bank to take just such an aggressive stance — even as European political leaders have repeatedly failed to devise concrete near-term plans to address Europe’s debt problems and deteriorating finances.

Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist at the consulting firm High Frequency Economics and a professed bear on the European outlook, said he was stunned by the size of the monetary operation, saying it suggested that Europe’s central bank had “shown a path toward averting catastrophic collapse in Europe.”

Indeed, some analysts suggest the central bank’s new lending program represents a kind of back door to the easy-money policy pursued by the Federal Reserve after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, which is widely credited with averting a broader economic disaster.

The three-year loans the central bank made Wednesday come with a bargain-basement interest rate of 1 percent, providing the region’s financial institutions with the kind of cheap financing they can no longer get from the market. Among other requirements, Europe’s banks need the money to refinance about a trillion dollars in loans that mature in 2012. Wednesday’s infusion could also help reduce the pressure on beleaguered government borrowers on the periphery of the Continent, most significantly Italy and Spain. Those countries have not been able to directly tap European Central Bank funds, even as investors are increasingly reluctant to finance those countries’ debt by buying their bonds.

Now, though, by lending to commercial banks at such low rates for three years, the central bank might induce them to use some of the newly available money to buy shorter-term government bonds, which have higher yields, or interest rates. Spain’s two-year government bond, for example, is currently yielding 3.64 percent.

Mario Draghi, the central bank’s new president, has resisted calls to stand directly behind debtor governments by buying their bonds as necessary, without limit. But the volume of money pumped into the system on Wednesday suggested that Mr. Draghi was prepared to indirectly support those governments through their nation’s commercial banks.

“This is exactly what happened in the United States with the Fed in 2008,” said Mr. Weinberg, the economist. By buying up bad loans and other impaired assets, and lending money to the banks, government officials in the United States were able to buy time for American banks to strengthen their depleted balance sheets.

But in the current case, European officials confront an even trickier situation. Not only must the banks borrow, but indebted European governments have huge borrowing needs of their own, totaling 1.1 trillion euros ($1.4 trillion) in 2012.

Despite those twin threats, German political leaders have opposed any outright bailout either for the banking system or for troubled government borrowers like Italy and Spain, whose free-spending ways have long irked voters in Germany, Europe’s largest economy and a principal financier of any bailouts.

If it works, the quiet virtue of the European Central Bank’s new lending program will be that it helped buttress banks while easing the pressure on governments — without the appearance of a direct rescue.

Although the program did not take effect until this week, it was announced on Dec. 8 as part of a broader series of European Central Bank efforts to stabilize anxious credit markets. The central bank said it would offer three-year loans — rather than the one-year limit it had previously imposed — and would accept a wider variety of financial assets as collateral, to make it easier for banks to qualify for the loans.

The central bank is accepting the banks’ outstanding loans as security, a measure meant to help smaller community banks that might lack conventional forms of collateral like bonds.

“In many ways, it was a success,” said Nicolas Véron, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels. “But it exposes the E.C.B. to risks linked to the banks because no one knows the quality of the collateral they are providing.”

Until Wednesday’s announcement, it was not known how many banks would apply for the new loans or how much they would borrow.

In the end, 523 banks tapped the new program, borrowing 489.2 billion euros, well above the 300 billion euro estimate that market experts had been predicting. Though some of that money includes funds earmarked to replace existing loans, economists estimate that Wednesday’s action could inject 190 billion to 270 billion euros, as much as $353 billion, of new money into the European financial system.

The large number of banks that participated is also an indicator that the program has avoided the kind of welfare stigma attached to other types of rescue packages. Because the central bank does not reveal the borrowers’ identities, it is not known exactly which banks participated. But Italian banks including UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo borrowed a significant amount, a total of 116 billion euros among them, according to Reuters.

“This is as good as it gets for the banks,” said Gilles Moec, co-head of economic research for Deutsche Bank. “It’s a big deal.”

He said one crucial test of whether the new approach could address the bigger challenge of easing borrowing conditions for governments would come in February, when Italy has 46 billion euros worth of debt coming due. That same month, the European Central Bank plans to offer banks another round of three-year loans.

Mr. Draghi, despite his earlier opposition to channeling the central bank’s loans into government coffers, acknowledged in a speech Monday to the European Parliament that commercial banks might end up doing just that with their new, cheap money. “We don’t know how many government bonds they are going to buy,” he said.

Strong demand at recent Spanish debt auctions have driven down yields, suggesting that banks were loading up on the debt to use as collateral for the central bank loans, analysts said. But there are limits to their appetites for governments’ debt at a time when the banks are trying to reduce their vulnerability to a potential debt default by a big country like Italy, while also protecting themselves against the possibility of a breakup of the euro currency union if the 17 member nation’s cannot resolve the crisis.

Pumping new money into an economy is often seen as a textbook ingredient for inflation, if it leads to easy credit for businesses and consumers and a resultant spending spree. But that prospect is widely considered unlikely, at least initially, because Europe appears headed for an economic downturn. A weak economy will discourage much private borrowing.

Mr. Moec said the risk of higher inflation was minimal because “that would require that the banks were actually making loans to the private sector, and we think that’s going to take a while.”

Cricketmadbd

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard longpitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the runs scored by the batting team. A run is scored by the striking batsman hitting the ball with his bat, running to the opposite end of the pitch and touching the crease there without being dismissed. The teams switch between batting and fielding at the end of an innings.

In professional cricket the length of a game ranges from 20 overs of six bowling deliveries per side to Test cricket played over five days. The Laws of Cricket are maintained by the International Cricket Council (ICC) and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) with additional Standard Playing Conditions for Test matches and One Day Internationals.

Cricket was first played in southern England in the 16th century. By the end of the 18th century, it had developed into the national sport of England. The expansion of the British Empire led to cricket being played overseas and by the mid-19th century the first international matches were being held. The ICC, the game's governing body, has ten full members. The game is played particularly in Australasia, the Indian subcontinent, the West Indies, Southern Africa and England. For all the cricket information you can visit:  http://www.cricketmadbd.blogspot.com/

AT&T Ends $39 Billion Bid for T-Mobile

T-Mobile, the weakest of the four national operators, is now left with an uncertain future.

AT&T on Monday ended its effort to buy T-Mobile USA, acknowledging that it could not overcome stiff opposition by the Obama administration to form the nation’s biggest cellphone service provider.

The decision to scrap the $39 billion takeover — which would have been the biggest deal of the year — is a major setback for AT&T, which had pinned its hopes for growth on the acquisition. The company wanted T-Mobile’s cellular airwaves, or spectrum, to relieve its congested network and offer faster service for data-hungry devices like the iPhone.

And the deal’s end leaves T-Mobile, the weakest of the four national operators, with an uncertain future.

For the Obama administration, the collapse of the deal is confirmation that it has reinvigorated antitrust oversight that it said had become weak under its predecessor. The Justice Department took the aggressive step of suing to block the deal in late August, while the Federal Communications Commission had signaled its intent to fight the merger as well.

“People in this town didn’t think that the department was willing to take the risk to litigate big, complex cases,” said a senior Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because employees were not authorized to go beyond the department’s public statement. “But this puts down a very firm marker that we are taking antitrust enforcement very seriously.”

The company had sought to offer concessions to win regulatory approval, including potentially selling more than a quarter of T-Mobile’s customers and spectrum to a competitor like Leap Wireless.

Other ideas included possible network-sharing agreements, though those were less fully developed.

After the F.C.C. declared its opposition to the deal, AT&T withdrew its application for approval from the agency on Thanksgiving. Last week, AT&T asked for a delay in the Justice Department lawsuit as it weighed its options.

By this last weekend, AT&T had concluded that no change to its bid would have been enough to pass muster, according to people briefed on the matter.

A merger of the two companies, consumer advocates had said, would have created a duopoly of AT&T and Verizon Wireless with almost three-quarters of the market between them.

“Consumers won today,” Sharis A. Pozen, the Justice Department’s acting assistant attorney general for antitrust, said in a statement. “Had AT&T acquired T-Mobile, consumers in the wireless marketplace would have faced higher prices and reduced innovation.”

AT&T will pay Deutsche Telekom $4 billion in cash and wireless spectrum access as a break-up fee under the terms of the merger announced in March. After taxes, however, the financial hit to AT&T will be only about $1.5 billion, or roughly two months’ worth of cash flow. The two companies will now begin a seven-year roaming agreement that will expand T-Mobile’s national coverage.

That agreement, however, does not solve AT&T’s network constraints. Nor does it shore up T-Mobile’s diminishing competitive position. Deutsche Telekom has indicated that it would like to dispose of T-Mobile eventually, having failed to develop it into a stronger competitor to AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel.

The push for a merger was spearheaded by Randall L. Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman and chief executive, in his first bold strategic step since taking the reins in 2007.

To support the deal, AT&T lined up an assortment of lawmakers, corporate customers and local partners to promote the benefits of the merger.

But that campaign held little sway over government regulators, who were skeptical of arguments that uniting two of the nation’s biggest wireless companies would not harm competition. The Justice Department joined with several state attorneys general in its antitrust lawsuit and hired prominent outside counsel. And the F.C.C. published its staff’s 157-page internal report laying out its concerns about the deal.

AT&T had prepared for battle with the government, adopting at times an openly hostile stance toward the F.C.C. And few people thought the Justice Department would be able to fend off AT&T, whose Washington lobbying operation is legendary.

Still, the companies said from the beginning that they were willing to consider conditions that might be required to allow the deal to proceed. And the Justice Department had taken criticism for approving other big deals, including Comcast’s takeover of NBCUniversal.

In the case of AT&T, Justice Department officials repeatedly signaled that they would oppose the deal, and finally sued the company in late summer.

On Monday, AT&T said it would continue to invest in expanding its network. But Mr. Stephenson warned lawmakers that they must take action to increase the availability of wireless spectrum to help expand faster cellular data coverage.

“The mobile Internet is a dynamic industry that can be a critical driver in restoring American economic growth and job creation, but only if companies are allowed to react quickly to customer needs and market forces,” he said.

Analysts said that Deutsche Telekom must weigh the future of T-Mobile, including a potential sale of assets or an initial public offering.

One potential partner is Dish Network, the satellite TV provider. Its chief executive, Joseph Clayton , told Bloomberg News last week that his company was willing to pool its wireless holdings with T-Mobile’s to create a stronger competitor to AT&T and Verizon.

“T-Mobile is probably going to be profoundly damaged by this,” Tero Kuittinen, an independent research analyst, said. “They should have done some strategic rethinking instead of chasing this mirage, this dream of a merger. Now they’ve lost a lot of time.”

Rules to Stop Pupil and Teacher From Getting Too Social Online

Lewis Holloway, a schools superintendent in Georgia, has imposed a strict social media policy.

Faced with scandals and complaints involving teachers who misuse social media, school districts across the country are imposing strict new guidelines that ban private conversations between teachers and their students on cellphones and online platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The policies come as educators deal with a wide range of new problems. Some teachers have set poor examples by posting lurid comments or photographs involving sex or alcohol on social media sites. Some have had inappropriate contact with students that blur the teacher-student boundary. In extreme cases, teachers and coaches have been jailed on sexual abuse and assault charges after having relationships with students that, law enforcement officials say, began with electronic communication.

But the stricter guidelines are meeting resistance from some teachers because of the increasing importance of technology as a teaching tool and of using social media to engage with students. In Missouri, the state teachers union, citing free speech, persuaded a judge that a new law imposing a statewide ban on electronic communication between teachers and students was unconstitutional. Lawmakers revamped the bill this fall, dropping the ban but directing school boards to develop their own social media policies by March 1.

School administrators acknowledge that the vast majority of teachers use social media appropriately. But they also say they are increasingly finding compelling reasons to limit teacher-student contact. School boards in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia have updated or are revising their social media policies this fall.

“My concern is that it makes it very easy for teachers to form intimate and boundary-crossing relationships with students,” said Charol Shakeshaft, chairwoman of the Department of Educational Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has studied sexual misconduct by teachers for 15 years. “I am all for using this technology. Some school districts have tried to ban it entirely. I am against that. But I think there’s a middle ground that would allow teachers to take advantage of the electronic technology and keep kids safe.”

Lewis Holloway, the superintendent of schools in Statesboro, Ga., imposed a new policy this fall prohibiting private electronic communications after learning that Facebook and text messages had helped fuel a relationship between an eighth grade English teacher and her 14-year-old male pupil. The teacher was arrested this summer on charges of aggravated child molestation and statutory rape, and remains in jail awaiting trial.

“It can start out innocent and get more and more in depth quickly,” said Mr. Holloway, a school administrator for 38 years. “Our students are vulnerable through new means, and we’ve got to find new ways to protect them.”

Mr. Holloway said he learned of other sexual misconduct cases when consulting with school administrators around the nation about social media policies. While there is no national public database of sexual misconduct by teachers, dozens of cases have made local headlines around the country this year.

In Illinois, a 56-year-old former language-arts teacher was found guilty in September on sexual abuse and assault charges involving a 17-year-old female student with whom he had exchanged more than 700 text messages. In Sacramento, a 37-year-old high school band director pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct stemming from his relationship with a 16-year-old female student; her Facebook page had more than 1,200 private messages from him, some about massages. In Pennsylvania, a 39-year-old male high school athletic director pleaded guilty in November to charges of attempted corruption of a minor; he was arrested after offering a former male student gifts in exchange for sex.

School administrators are also concerned about teachers’ revealing too much information about their private lives. As part of a policy adopted last month in Muskegon, Mich., public school employees were warned they could face disciplinary charges for posting on social media sites photos of themselves using alcohol or drugs. “We wanted to have a policy that encourages interaction between our students and parents and teachers,” said Jon Felske, superintendent for Muskegon’s public schools. “That is how children learn today and interact. But we want to do it with the caveat: keep work work — and keep private your personal life.”

New York City, the nation’s largest school district, has been at work on a social media policy for months, and expects to have one in place by spring. In the meantime, controversies over social media erupt regularly, like one earlier this month over a Bronx principal whose Facebook page included a risqué picture that was then posted in the hallways of her school.

Richard J. Condon, special commissioner of investigation for New York City schools, said there had been a steady increase in the number of complaints of inappropriate communications involving Facebook alone in recent years — 85 complaints from October 2010 through September 2011, compared with only eight from September 2008 through October 2009.

What worries some educators is that overly restrictive policies will remove an effective way of engaging students who regularly use social media platforms to communicate.

“I think the reason why I use social media is the same reason everyone else uses it: it works,” said Jennifer Pust, head of the English department at Santa Monica High School, where a nonfraternization policy governs both online and offline relationships with students. “I am glad that it is not more restrictive. I understand we need to keep kids safe. I think that we would do more good keeping kids safe by teaching them how to use these tools and navigate this online world rather than locking it down and pretending that it is not in our realm.”

Nicholas Provenzano, 32, who has been teaching English for 10 years at Grosse Point High School in Michigan, acknowledged that “all of us using social media in a positive way with kids have to take 15 steps back whenever there is an incident.” But he said the benefits were many and that he communicated regularly with his students in an open forum, mostly through Twitter, responding to their questions about assignments. He has even shared a photo of his 6-month-old son. On occasion, he said, he will exchange private messages about an assignment or school-related task. He said that in addition to modeling best practices on social media use, he has been able to engage some students on Twitter who would not raise their hand in class.

He also said social media networks allowed him to collaborate on projects in other parts of the country. Facebook offers guidance for teachers and recommends they communicate on a public page.

Some teachers, however, favor a sharply defined barrier. In Dayton, Ohio, where the school board imposed a social media policy this fall, limiting teachers to public exchanges on school-run networks, the leader of the teachers union welcomed the rules. “I see it as protecting teachers,” said David A. Romick, president of the Dayton Education Association. “For a relationship to start with friending or texting seems to be heading down the wrong path professionally.”