Led by William Shatner, some Web watchers are taking Twitter to task for letting brand account sneak into the “Following” lists of some users. “You might find some brands or people showing up there, even if you don’t follow them,” Marketing Land reports. “If so, that seems due to either a new change or a newly noticed change in how Twitter is doing placement for promoted accounts.” Shatner first notice that MasterCard made it into his Following list, even though he never actually followed the financial services brand. 

For the past year, American Express has turned over its social accounts to influencers for a short time to gain followers and buzz. Based on some results from a recent two-week Instagram campaign,  it’s clicked with users. The posts were created by graphic designer Ann Kim, chef Christina Tosi, Patrick Janelle (who won the CFDA's first Fashion Instagrammer of the Year Award, designers Oleema and Kalani Miller and Timo Weiland and Team Epiphany managing partner Coltrane Curtis. The group posted a series of pictures (see examples below) depicting how AmEx impacts their businesses. Per AmEx, the #MyAmex posts generated …

Pinterest’s road map to monetization is becoming more clear. It is making Promoted Pins program, in beta for the past eight months, available to all advertisers Jan. 1. Pinterest says the brands that participated in the Promoted Pins beta program saw a 30% increase in “earned media” — or the amount of people who save a Promoted Pin to one of the boards. Promoted Pins are repinned an average of 11 times, the same as a normal pin made by one of the site’s users.

Russia’s Internet watchdog is hard at work trying to quash social media mentions of a mass rally next month supporting opposition activist Alexei Navalny, a major critic of Vladimir Putin. A key figure in Russia’s anti-government protests in 2011-2012, he is currently under house arrest. The general prosecutor had requested that access be blocked “to Internet pages on Facebook which contain calls to unauthorized mass events,” including the page for next month's event for Navalny." He said Facebook fulfilled the request.

Thanks to an imperfect algorithm, Facebook’s “Year In Review” feature is leaving some of its 1.3 billion users feeling hurt and betrayed. Take Web developer and author Eric Meyer, whose review featured his deceased daughter, Rebecca, who succumbed to brain cancer on her sixth birthday, this past year. “My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl,” Meyer writes in a blog post -- referring to the artificially-upbeat message that most Facebook users have received, which tells them: “Here’s what your year looked like!” Says Meyer: “It was … unkind to remind me so forcefully.” 

Law enforcement can employ fake Instagram accounts to befriend and build cases against suspected criminals, a federal judge in New Jersey has decided. “No search warrant is required for the consensual sharing of this type of information,” United States District Judge William Martini writes in a new opinion. As Ars Technica reports, the decision stems from a criminal case involving a man accused of pulling off a series of burglaries in and around New Jersey. 

Backchannel considers how a few otherwise-unknown women came to rule Pinterest. These so-called social media “Pinomenons” appear to have benefited greatly from an early experiment at Pinterest, which involved “recommending accounts to solve an onboarding headache or high bounce rate,” according to Backchannel. Early on, as a spokeswoman at Pinterest confirms, since “the group of Pinner [sic] signing up was a smaller pool, there was a smaller, static list of recommended content curators.” 

With the hackers that crippled Sony seemingly out of reach, the company is going after those platforms and news publications that have helped to distribute its stolen emails. “Sony’s lawyer has threatened Twitter with legal action if the social networking company doesn’t ban accounts that are sharing the leaks,” Motherboard reports, citing internal emails. Sony says it plans to hold Twitter responsible for “any damage or loss” arising from the use of its stolen emails. 

Has the anonymous social networking trend run its course? That might be an overstatement, but as TechCrunch reports, turning the trend into a successful business model is proving harder than most imagined. A number of services -- most recently Secret -- are repositioning themselves as safer environments for users. But, that hasn’t done much for their appeal among users looking for juicy rumors and gossip. “And thus demonstrates the vicious cycle for anonymous apps,” TechCrunch writes. “Let people misbehave, and the app buzzes with activity. Sanitize the experience to protect people’s feelings … and the app fails.”  

As promised, Instagram has been purging its platform of “spammy” fake accounts. As a result, “More than 29 percent of Instagram’s followers, or 18.9 million users, disappeared from Wednesday to Thursday,” The New York Times reports, citing data from software developer Zach Allia. Also, “The singer Justin Bieber lost 3.5 million fans, or 15 percent of his total, while Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million followers, or 5.5 percent of her fan base."