French TV, radio programs slapped with social media restriction

Paris (CNN) -- A decree from the early 1990s, reimplemented by French regulators, is putting an end to French television and radio announcers naming social networking sites on air except for news purposes.

The decree banned "clandestine advertising": the promotion of a brand outside the boundaries of recognized publicity avenues.

The reimplementation of the ruling by France's Superior Audiovisual Council means that French programs will no longer be able to urge their viewers or listeners to follow them on specific sites, such as Twitter, as has become the norm in worldwide broadcasting.

The controversy began when an unnamed French TV channel approached the council to ask whether, under this decree, they had the right to direct viewers to social sites.

Christine Kelly, spokeswoman for the council explained: "Facebook and Twitter are commercial brands like Coca-Cola or L'Oreal or any other. There are many social networking sites on many topics -- cooking, animals -- why should we mention one and not others?"

From now on news anchors will be able to give only vague instructions as to where to find information online, such as "follow us on social networking sites."

French bloggers have been up in arms on Twitter and some have even composed tongue-in-cheek ways to get round the ban. One suggested: "find live coverage of the trial on our thread on the platform which spreads messages of 140 characters"

French commentators have been speculating on the real roots of this regulation. Matthew Fraser, a social networking expert and author of "Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom," a book looking at the online social media revolution, believes the ban could be a sign of defiance against Anglo-Saxon cultural domination.

"In my mind," he said, "if it had been a French social networking site then nobody would have wanted it to be regulated, but because these sites symbolize the United States, regulation is there."

This is not the first time anglicized, Internet-related vocabulary has been banned in France. In 2003 the use of the word "e-mail" was forbidden in all government literature. This was due to the Toubon law, which tries to protect the purity of the French language from anglicized words and phrases.

This time, however, the Superior Audiovisual Council insists that the ban is in no way linked to language purity.

"It's not at all related. It's true that we are very attached to the French language and defend it a lot, but ... this is simply about reapplying existing regulations," Kelly said.

The council's decision did not cause much of a debate in the French media. Fraser believes that unlike cheese or wine there were no French interests involved and the French are simply used to regulation. "It doesn't faze them because it's part of their culture," he said.

Kelly emphasized the cultural differences that need to be taken in to account: "We have many, many rules which do not exist elsewhere. There is a very different context for this from one country to another. In the U.S., for example there are advertisements on TV every five minutes, whereas in France its more like every 20 minutes." She added that, similarly, in the United States product placement is commonplace, but it is forbidden in France.

Many are struck by the bizarre timing of the ban as it comes on the heels of the e-G8, an internet summit in Paris at which President Nicolas Sarkozy met with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook brings facial recognition to photo tagging

(Mashable) -- Facebook Photos, one of the social network's most popular features, is getting a big and potentially controversial upgrade with a new feature that automatically suggests who users should tag in photos based on facial recognition technology.

The new feature, Tag Suggestions, will begin rolling out to U.S. users next week, according to Facebook Vice President of Product Chris Cox.

He told us that the product utilizes technology that was built in-house, as well as some technology that came from partners. Cox did not disclose the partners Facebook worked with for Tag Suggestions, although we have our suspicions.

Tag Suggestions is fairly straightforward. Whenever you're offered the chance to tag groups of your friends in an album, Facebook will utilize its facial recognition technology to group similar faces together and automatically suggest the friend you should tag them with.

Facebook fills in the "Who is this?" box with its suggestion -- all you have to do is click the "Save Tags" button to accept.

Cox says that suggestions will only appear when its algorithms have "high confidence" of who's being suggested. Unlike Face.com, Facebook doesn't reveal its certainty level and wouldn't reveal what percentage actually correlates to "high confidence."

The social giant is also preemptively addressing the potential privacy issues that will be brought up from automatic, algorithmic tagging. Users can opt out of Tag Suggestions by going to their privacy settings and disabling the "Suggest photos of me to friends" feature.

This release is part of a bigger effort to upgrade Photos. Earlier this year, Facebook launched a slew of upgrades, including bigger thumbnails, group tagging and drag-and-drop photos.

This may be the biggest upgrade for Photos yet, though. Photo tagging is considered a chore by many users, yet it is the company's most popular product.

"Photos are by far the most engaging content Facebook has ever had," Cox told us earlier today.

By vastly simplifying the tagging process, Facebook expects that its millions of users will tag more photos, which will create millions of new engagement points and social connections, making it that much more addicting.