Well, thank goodness for that: California lawmakers have voted overwhelmingly to make it illegal for employers to ask job applicants or employees for their social media passwords; it also forbids retaliation against employees who refuse to share passwords. The bill, AB 1844, was passed in a unanimous vote by California's Senate, 37-0. The bill next goes to the State Assembly for a vote, where it is almost certain to be passed.

While they share understandable concerns about online predators, bullying, and unwise activities like "sexting," most parents have a mostly positive view of social media's impact on their children's lives, according to a new national survey by Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, MO.

Facebook had fewer unique U.S. visitors in June 2012 than it did in June 2011, according to comScore, marking the first time that the world's dominant social network has experienced a year-over-year decline. In June 2011 Facebook attracted 160.9 million unique visitors; the number declined by 1.1 million, or 0.7%, to 159.8 million unique visitors in June 2012. The peak number of users was achieved in January of this year, when Facebook attracted 168 million unique U.S. visitors, also per comScore.

Social media is now intertwined with geopolitics, and not always in a good way, as illustrated by rising tensions in south Asia, where India is accusing Pakistan of contributing to rumor-mongering which provoked a mass exodus in India last week. As noted in a post last week, the situation in India traces back to ethnic and religious conflict in the country's northeast, where some 80 Muslims, many of them settlers from across the border in Bangladesh, have been killed by locals in the northeastern state of Assam. As a result, northeastern Indians living in other parts of India feared that …

While social media has contributed to the fall of dictators and the hunt for war criminals, it can also help catalyze civil disorder arising from various socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic tensions. In the latest example, the Indian government is asking security and law enforcement agencies to monitor social media sites for inflammatory content and rumor-mongering following another bout of communal violence.

The abysmal performance of social media stock is prompting tech and finance writers to churn out a lot of stories about the "social media bubble" which "popped." I will admit to contributing to this pile of verbiage with some doom-y predictions of my own. But unless I am missing something -- and tech-y finance people, please correct me if I'm wrong -- this was the social media bubble that wasn't.

Everyone seems to be talking about Bobak Ferdowsi, a.k.a. "Mohawk Guy," the telegenic young NASA rocket scientist who captured the social media world's heart with his punk rock hairdo. With NASA battling budget cuts, image is more important than ever -- something Wernher von Braun, the legendary ex-Nazi rocket scientist who oversaw the Mercury and Apollo programs, knew all about. With the help of a social medium, MediaPost has contacted von Braun for a quick interview about PR and space exploration in the age of social media.

With the notable exception of LinkedIn, the first social media companies to go public have suffered a fairly disastrous debut, with investors apparently souring on Groupon, Zynga, and Facebook. The falling fortunes of all three social media stocks reflect widening skepticism about the viability of their business models -- extending, in at least some cases, to the efficacy of social media advertising.

If there's one thing human beings can be counted on to do with admirable regularity, it's judge other people: we just can't get enough of that judging thing, it seems. Now there's a new social network, Karmafied,com, which is devoted to judging the deeds of individuals, good and bad, and assigning them -- you guessed it -- a score.

Controversy over a Facebook page mocking aborigines may result in new legislation in Australia's parliament compelling social media sites to remove racist content, Australian newspapers reported this week. The page included images and statements about aborigines which hammered home, in none-too-subtle fashion, racist stereotypes about Australia's first inhabitants. In the ensuing popular outcry, Facebook at first refused to remove the page, citing the need to protect free speech, then took the page down briefly, but later allowed it be reposted as "controversial humor."