A Canadian legislator is proposing a national anti-bullying campaign amid mounting anecdotal (and some statistical) evidence that bullying is on the rise thanks to social media. Dany Morin, a member of Canada's lower house of parliament, made his proposal following the much-publicized suicide of Amanda Todd, a 15-year old in Vancouver, who killed herself several weeks after posting a heartfelt account of her experience being bullied both online and offline. As if to indicate the extent of the problem, online memorials to Todd have attracted hateful posts, which are eliciting a new wave of anger over bullies and anonymous online …

A number of studies have shown that social media can help promote healthy lifestyle habits, with potential applications including weight loss, smoking cessation, and now STD prevention. That's according to a new article published in the November issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, which suggests that social media can increase condom use by young adults -- at least for a while.

Some of social media's most positive features, including the ease of and ubiquity of online commenting, may make it an obstacle to the judicial process, according to the Australian judge in charge of a high-profile murder trial.

There's more than one way to skin a cat (or so I've been told) and there's more than one social network you can use to find a new job. Indeed, while you might think LinkedIn is the logical first choice, Facebook is actually used by more Americans looking for new jobs, according to the 2012 Social Job Seeker Survey, a poll of 2,108 U.S. adults performed for Jobvite by The Polling Company.

While social media has the potential to transform everything from art to activism to advertising, some people seem to think it was invented chiefly as a platform to inform everyone they know, and lots of people they don't, of everything that is wrong in their lives and the world at large. I don't know why they do it -- maybe they derive pleasure from superficial expressions of sympathy, maybe they don't realize how tedious and pointless it is, maybe they just can't stop themselves -- but there's no question that chronic complainers are a veritable plague on social media.

Okay, this is just bizarre: if getting a "like" on Facebook doesn't make you feel warm and fuzzy enough, how about an inflatable vest that gives you a "hug" every time you get the stamp of social media approval? Yes, it's a real thing, or rather will be soon, thanks to MIT researchers Andy Payne and Phil Seaton and artist Melissa Kit Chow. While it's unclear if the "Like-A-Hug" vest will ever go to commercial production, Chow describes the concept thusly: "Like-A-Hug is a wearable social media vest that allows for hugs to be given via Facebook, bringing us closer …

Of all the new businesses that have emerged in conjunction with social media, casual gaming is potentially one of the most profitable -- but clearly also one of the most volatile, as demonstrated by Zynga's ill-fated acquisition of OMGPOP, publisher of "Draw Something," in March of this year. Zynga paid $183 million for OMGPOP, in a deal that appeared to make sense at the time, given the popularity of Draw Something -- but in the casual game universe such popularity can prove all-too-fleeting.

In case you missed it, during the first debate last night some social media genius at KitchenAid -- yes, the kitchen appliance maker -- tweeted an offensive comment about Barack Obama's dead grandmother. The tweet read: "Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! She died 3 days b4 he became president." Hilarious! There's no need to bore you with the profuse apologies that followed from KitchenAid, since we've been through this exercise countless times already; needless to say, they apologized. I'm more interested in a couple questions which I genuinely cannot answer.

Social media provides an amazing set of tools to help people organize themselves whatever their purpose may be, with applications ranging from revolutions to elections to social advocacy to group discounts to crowd-funding to shooting each other.

It's no secret that many people act like jerks online, and now there's some research which suggests why that might be the case. The forthcoming study from professors at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, first publicized in the Wall Street Journal, found that using Facebook increases our feelings of self-confidence and decreases our capacity for self-control.