Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented extreme
discipline taken against prisoners, especially in South Carolina, when inmates
violate prison policy by updating social media sites, especially Facebook.
Generally this happens with smuggled cell phones, or
sometimes when relatives or friends outside jail are given access by prisoners
to do the posts for them. Think Progress
has the story here.
Prisons may actually be violating Facebook TOS by
investigating and suspending accounts (because third party access violates TOS),
but Facebook has generally complied when prisons ask Facebook to terminate
prisoner accounts.
What sounds more provocative is the idea that giving
up Internet or any computer access is often part of a plea bargain. It sometimes is used as a bargaining chip to
settle civil disputes, where some allegation of copyright infringement or
defamation is made, but where the real intention is to silence a competitive
speaker.
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