When J.A. Barnes, a social anthropologist, studied a Norwegian fishing village and coinedthe term “socialnetwork” in the 1950s, few could have imagined that the adventof personal computers in the 1970s and the Internet in the 1980swould spawn the social networking services that today connectnearly half of the world's population.

The web-based and mobile technologies and applications nowcomprising social media power much of today's commercial and socialcommunications, providing individuals and businesses with limitlessopportunities to generate and publish electronic content: content that sometimes conflicts withpolicy application representations or the reported facts ofinsurance claims.

Internet-based social networking platforms rest on the premisethat people of similar personal or professional interests want tointeract, and the efficacy of a social network depends on suchpeople first being able to find one another. One cannot download amobile application today without being asked to share its useor permit entry into its data by certain social networking sitessuch as Facebook. Indeed, Facebook has become a nearly universalmeans of logging into many applications, rather than establishingapplication-specific profiles and logins.