As the Sun reminds us today: celebs are hot for Twitter and Facebook. Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Stephen Fry have massive fan/follower bases that hang on their every Tweet and update, a potential bonanza for brands with Twitter-savvy celeb spokespeople. Ah, but not so fast. New rules in the UK designed to protect the public from the celebrity-endorsed Tweet could impact this practice before it gets a chance to take off.

Is your company a legal-savvy social media player? There may be more to it than you think. The digital legal experts at Pinsent Mason, publishers of Out-Law.com put together a few tips to keep you social media team out of court. Here’s what you should know.

Facebook is just a cat’s whisker away from acquiring a trade mark in the USA for the word FACE. Fat Face, FaceTime and The North Face will be obliterated by The Social Networking Wizard! Beauty products of the world will be annihilated! My face is no longer my face!

The leash on the UK’s advertising watchdog is being loosened and it will finally get its teeth into social networks, with an expanded remit covering Facebook, Twitter and advertisers’ own websites. It’s a move which is long-overdue, though it won’t take effect for another six months.

The FTC investigation into retailer Ann Taylor’s blogger payola flap sent a jolting wake-up call to businesses looking to drum up some positive word-of-mouth buzz via the blogosphere. Ann Taylor may have gotten off lightly, but there are still some hard lessons for businesses to come out of this.

Is Facebook on a collision course with privacy watchdogs? There have been isolated complaints in the U.S. and in Europe to rein in the rapidly growing social network and how it handles user data, but …

Every day, quick bursts of highly targeted medical information are pumped into the Twitterverse, oblivious to most of us goof-offs blithely in search of the latest iPad reviews and Justin Bieber gossip.

Should drug makers be required to disclose up-front all the potential harmful side effects of new medications within a single, 140-character Tweet? And what about guidance on how to set up a Facebook fan page …

The Twitter advertizing platform isn’t even live yet and the UK’s advertizing standards watchdog already wants tighter controls. The same goes for Facebook.

Tag this one “kettle,” “pot,” “black.” The growing prospects of a Google antitrust probe on both sides of the Atlantic has drawn into the fray the search giant’s biggest nemesis: Microsoft. Not surprisingly, what’s shaping …