Media and Ethics

Through the Internet, a powerful global conversation has begun; people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge at an instant speed. Traditional media outlets such as television and magazines will either become fragmented or join in and integrate with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

 

Social media is an online interactive communication dialogue between two or more people taken place through mobile phones and technologies.

Social media includes blogging sites, micro-blogging sites such as Twitter and social networking sites such as Facebook. Social networking creates a shared dialogue between citizens, the government, businesses and non-governmental organisations.

 

Today social media has become an important aspect in everyone’s lives; almost everyone uses some kind of social media forum. Because social media is used by nearly everybody, one needs to act ethically and responsibly with regards to the content that they distribute online. Ethical considerations need to be taken into account when considering social media usage and distributing online content.

There are several ethical considerations of social media these include non-disclosure, data privacy and copyright, critical or offensive material, government censorship, activism and blurring of work and personal lives.

 

However I will only be discussing the critical and offensive material ethical consideration. I have been widely exposed to offensive material via my usage on Facebook, which is my choice of social networking.

Bullying, hate groups and crime are all considered offensive and they are all over social media today. Social networking sites have acceptable behaviour conditions but that’s all they can do. These social media policies attempt to decrease inappropriate social media usage but they can only control a certain extent.

I have been exposed to numerous accounts of offensive material and behaviours seen through Facebook. I have experienced girls fighting with one another directly calling each other terrible names and bringing others into their online fight, I have experienced racism and racist remarks, as well as animal abuse, photos of abused animals and I have witnessed nude photographs of people. I have also found it offensive when people support Rhino poaching initiatives, I found all of the above-mentioned offences, displeasing and leaving me feeling very uncomfortable on the site. This critical and offensive material should not be on sites such as Facebook, or any for that matter, it is unethical for a person to ruin such a fun, family friendly social interaction site.