Should a Facebook “like” be considered free speech, and protected under the First Amendment? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Carter appealed the decision, and Facebook stepped in to argue that a like is free speech in the same way that a political bumper sticker is. Facebook filed a brief in Carter’s defense, saying, “When a Facebook User Likes a Page on Facebook, she engages in speech protected by the First Amendment.”

“The district court’s holding that ”liking’’ a Facebook page is insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection’ because it does not ‘involve actual statements,’ J.A. 1159, betrays amisunderstanding of the nature of the communication at issue and disregards well-settled Supreme Court and Fourth Circuit precedent,” the company continued. “Liking a Facebook Page (or other website) is core speech: it is a statement that will be viewed by a small group of Facebook Friends or by a vast community of online users.”

“When Carter clicked the Like button on the Facebook Page entitled ‘Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff,’ the words ‘Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff’ and a photo of Adams appeared on Carter’s Facebook Profile in a list of Pages Carter had Liked, J.A. 570, 578 – the 21st-century equivalent of a front-yard campaign sign,” Facebook continued. “If Carter had stood on a street corner and announced, ‘I like Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff,’ there would be no dispute that his statement was constitutionally protected speech. Carter made that very statement; the fact that he did it online, with a click of a computer’s mouse, does not deprive Carter’s speech of constitutional protection.”

The debate certainly has large ramifications for not only practices on Facebook, but on the Internet at large, which as we all know, has become very, very social.

This week, a panel of three judges in Richmond, Virginia heard the case, and Facebook once again stepped up to defend Carter, though really it’s a defense of Facebook users in general. It can’t be good for Facebook if people start becoming afraid of what they can or cannot say on Facebook. Some people have even talked about leaving the social network because they don’t allow pictures of breasts. More censorship can’t be good for user growth.

According to a report from Bloomberg’s Tom Schoenberg, Facebook lawyer Aaron Panner told the judges, “Any suggestion that such communication has less than full constitutional protection would result in chilling the very valued means for communication the Internet has made possible.”

The company was reportedly given three minutes of argument time, and the judges refrained from asking Facebook any questions. The report also shares some quotes about Facebook “likes” from Robers’ lawyer:

“It’s like opening a door into a room,” Rosen, of Pender & Coward PC in Virginia Beach, Virginia, said. “You can’t see what’s in there until you click on the button. That’s not speech.”

“Facebook has 3 billion ‘like’ clicks a day,” he said. “Is each one of those speech? I don’t think so.”

As far as Facebook and many others are concerned, yes, each one of those is free speech.

At the same time, Roberts is claiming that the Facebook activity is not even the reason Carter (along with other employees) was fired, and that performance was the real reason. Still, the subject of the Facebook “like” remains the hot button issue, and has been argued throughout the case.

What do you think? Should a Facebook “like” be considered free speech, or do you not consider a “like” to be an act of speech at all? Let us know what you think in the comments.

What happened to Collier could happen to all of us. You see a nice picture on Facebook of a group of people and you think “oh, that’s lovely. I like that!” and so you like it. But lurking in the shadows are exposed testicles.

“Sneaky nuts” is a prank that involves sneakily showing one’s balls in a photograph, you know, by putting them through the zipper or something at the last minute. It’s kind of like a photobomb, but with your balls. Yeah, it’s not the internet’s best moment for sure.

Collier, a Liberal member of the Western Australian Legislative Council who currently serves Minister for Energy; Training and Workforce Development, says that he was simply tricked by a sneaky photo.

Hence the “sneaky nuts” part:

“At first glance it appeared to be a harmless picture. It was a silly mistake on my part. I only became aware of the actual content of the photo when shown by a journalist…This obviously highlights the pitfalls of social media. I apologise if I caused any offense,” said Collier in a statement.

The apology wasn’t enough for Labor Party MP sue Ellery, who has called for an investigation.

“This is a man who is a senior minister in charge of the professional standards of dealing with young people and young people’s use of social media,” she said.

It looks like politics are the same no matter where you go.

Luckily for the video’s creator, IAmAhYell, those who are simply fans of Radiohead on Facebook also get to see it, thanks to a Facebook feature that says things like, “Thom Yorke is posting about a Page you like: Radiohead.”

Radiohead has over ten million fans. It should be a good day for IAmAhYell’s YouTube views.

We noticed a new type of notification this morning, one that comes from Facebook and informs you that a certain post on a page on which you’re an admin is “performing better than 90% of other posts on the Page.” It then suggests that you “advertise it to get even better results.”

Various WebProNews writers received this same notification this morning (we’re all admins on the WPN Facebook page). Clicking on the notification takes us to the “Advertise on Facebook” page and gets us started on setting up a promoted post with said article.

Here’s what it looks like in the notifications:

I’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the test, and will update this article accordingly.

This isn’t the first attempt that Facebook has made in recent memory to get page owners to promote more of their posts. Last month, Facebook made a few subtle changes to Pages, including the addition of a new analytics box inside the admin panel. Facebook also softened the language of page promotion, changing the “promote” post button to one that says “boost” post.

That’s the message circulating around Facebook right now. The post claims that the whole thing was caught on surveillance video, and offers a link to said video.

Luckily for Eminem, the whole thing is just another Facebook hoax. One that if followed, will simply lead you down a path of survey scams, info phishing, and perpetuation of the scam via blanket Facebook shares.

Here’s what the hoax post looks like. It features what appears to be a white male, with multiple knife wounds on his back. I guess it could be Eminem, right?

Clicking on the link takes you to a site called amazingvid.biz, which features a video embed and what appears to be a Facebook comments plugin. But when you click to play the video, it asks you to share it with your Facebook friends before clicking play again. And those Facebook comments? Fake and unclickable. They’re simply there in an attempt to give legitimacy to the scam.

This Facebook scam is simply a rehash of a scam from 2011 that used the exact same image of a white male with his back sliced up to convince Facebook users that Justin Bieber had been stabbed “by a crazed fan outside an NYC nightclub.”

Jolie, who wrote a piece for the New York Times this week about her brave decision to go under the knife as a preemptive strike against breast cancer, says she did it partly because she watched her mom go through a battle with the disease and doesn’t want to leave her own children without their mom. Sambolin says the same thing inspired her to elect for the invasive surgery.

“I struggled for weeks trying to figure out how tell you that I had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was leaving to have surgery then Angelina Jolie shares her story of a double mastectomy and gives me strength and an opening,” Sambolin wrote on Facebook.

Sambolin says her prognosis is a good one due to early detection, and says she wants to warn women of the dangers of being neglectful with their breast care. She is scheduled to undergo surgery on May 28.

BGR cites a “trusted source” who says that sales of the HTC First have been so terrible that AT&T has decided to discontinue the device and return all unsold inventory to HTC.

The source doesn’t have exact figures on the sales, but apparently less than $15,000 units were sold since AT&T slashed the price to $0.99 (with a 2-year contract) last week.

From BGR:

For some perspective, BGR has been informed that sales of the HTC First have been even worse than HTC Chacha sales were back in 2011, when AT&T launched the ill-fated phone as the Status…We’re told that AT&T sales representatives do not like Facebook Home or the First at all, and they are making little if any effort to sell the handset to customers. Right now iPhones and Samsung’s Galaxy S4 are the biggest sellers at AT&T by a substantial margin, our source said.

Ouch.

Facebook and HTC announced the HTC First’s exclusive AT&T launch during their April 4th Facebook Home event.

The HTC First has been referred to as the “Facebook Phone,” because it came pre-installed with Facebook Home. Of course, Home is also available on a handful of other Android devices and has been available for download since April 12th. Home in general has been underperforming – although it just crossed a million installs, it has a terrible 2-star rating in the Google Play Store. The failure of the HTC first, if this report is accurate, simply underscores the fact that the Facebook Home experiment is well on its way to official bomb status.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment and will update this article accordingly.

UPDATE: Facebook is not commenting on the report. We have also contacted AT&T for comment.

UPDATE 2: AT&T had this to say:

“As mentioned previously, we do pricing promotions all the time and have made no decisions on future plans.”

When interviewer Darren Franich asked Diesel what he attributes his large Facebook following to, he responded, “Did you ever see the movie Social Network? Do you remember what they said the reason was to make Facebook?”

To which Franich replied, “To meet girls?”

“YOU GOT IT!” said Diesel. “And when they made the movie, nobody had a million fans. They were promoting it, like, ‘We came up with a new way for people to check marital status.’ That’s not what Facebook was. That’s not why Facebook would be successful. No one gives a s— about people’s marital status. That’s as dated as MySpace! What Facebook didn’t realize is something very big was about to happen, and that was — for the first time in history, and it’s kind of a fluke they didn’t see this coming — when I jumped on that page in April 2009, I started talking to people. In the realest ways. Imagine if you could’ve been a Facebook friend to Marlon Brando, or whoever your role models are. Imagine, if you were able to Facebook Elvis, and talk to him, and hear from him without the Hollywood of it all. That was the Fast & Furious experience.”

Diesel said when he started his page, the only person who had a million fans was Barack Obama. It was the first quarter of 2009, just after the President’s inauguration.

“Facebook used to ask me to come up to their office to explain what the f— I was doing, and why I had so many fans. What was unique was: I never let anyone do a post, I never let anyone post for me in the last four years. My audience knows me so well on the page that if my producing partner’s in the room when I post, they’ll know somebody was around me. That’s kind of cool, that’s how sophisticated they are. Facebook really owes me billions of dollars. But whatever.”

It’s certainly worth noting, as indicated in the interview, that Diesel was laughing when he said that.

In 2013, Vin Diesel is still having fun with Facebook fans. For Valentine’s Day, he covered Rihanna’s “Stay” as a gift to them.

41 million people currently like Vin Diesel on Facebook. 35 million like Obama.

In the EW interview, Diesel talks about much more than Facebook (including Fast & Furious, Riddick and and Hannibal the Conqueror).

“Bing already lets you view Facebook updates and comments from your friends in sidebar, but now you’ll also be able to add your own Likes and comments to your friends’ Facebook posts directly from Bing,” a Bing spokesperson tells WebProNews. “This is yet another step in Bing’s efforts to make it easier for people to leverage all of the incredible information across the web and content within their social networks to help them spend less time searching and more time doing.”

“Say you’re a huge Beyoncé fan and are searching Bing to see what she’s up to, such as the latest on her trip to Cuba,” the spokesperson says. “While searching, you see a post in Bing’s sidebar from a Facebook friend who has an extra ticket to the sold out Beyoncé concert this week. With Bing, you can now comment on your friend’s Facebook post in one step, directly in sidebar, and claim the extra ticket. You’ve gone from simply browsing for news to attending the concert in one simple step. With Bing’s social search you can connect with your friends and engage with your social world to get things done – all in one spot.”

Of course none of this applies to the “Bing it On” challenge, which Microsoft just kicked off a new campaign for. The site, which lets you do side-by-side blind comparisons between Google and Bing results, strips out special features from each search engine, including Bing’s Facebook integration and Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Bing continues to be a major partner of Facebook’s, also providing the web search results to Facebook’s Graph Search.

TechCrunch points to reports in the Israeli press from Calcalist, Ynet and The Marker (all in Hebrew) indicating that Facebook is in “advanced due dilligence on a deal,” and that negotiations have been going on for six months.

TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden reports: “We have been digging too and have picked up confirmation from a source that both sides have privately confirmed that the deal is happening, and that the pricing reported first by the Calcalist [between $800 million and $1 billion] is accurate.”

The deal would apparently be a move for Facebook to capture more mobile users, not unlike its famous Instagram deal.

Reports of Facebook’s interest in Waze are nothing new. There was talk that the two companies were in discussions at least as far back as August, when Globes reported, “The purpose of the talks is not known, but the two companies are reportedly headed for collaboration, possibly involving the use of Waze’s application via Facebook. Alternatively, Facebook may acquire Waze.”

Waze is an Israeli startup, but its main office is in Palo Alto.