UK Press To Create Guidelines About Using Social Networking Info In News Stories
from the public-info-is-public dept
You may have noticed lately that whenever a story breaks about a young person doing something bad (say, shooting up a school or losing a bank billions of dollars), one of the first things the press does is rush to MySpace, Facebook or other social networks to see what they can learn about the person in question. Apparently, that's ticking off some of the people whose profile info is being used. Thus, a media industry watchdog in the UK is trying to come up with guidelines for the use of such info. This seems a little odd, of course. The info you put on your public profile is just that: public. So getting upset that it's being used in the press seems a bit questionable. Instead of setting guidelines for the media, why not just remind people that public info is public?
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: guidelines, press, social networks
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
because
[ link to this | view in thread ]
You're looking at it the wrong way...
This may even be a response from the media similar to the response from universities/colleges about the use of online resources (there are fairly strict guidelines about the use of information found via, say, google and wikipedia, which usually boils down to "don't use them"). They can be heavily biased, completely false, and they can lead to lazy habits in the researcher. All of which are bad for journalism.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Read the article, they agree with you.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: You're looking at it the wrong way...
On the other hand off line sources tend to be highly biased, and often completely false (White house briefs anyone). To make matters worse they encourage lazy research habits because it's harder to collect a lot of data to correlate, and there's some encouragement to use just a single source (Because there are fewer sources)
Interesting that we both shout about the other's methods for the same reason. How about we compromise and say that lazy researching is lazy stupid and foolish?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: You're looking at it the wrong way...
I take it you've never heard of Dunblane, then. School shootings may have become pretty much synonymous with the US, but don't think it doesn't happen elsewhere. I agree with the rest of the points, though.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Fueled by suicide
The parents of these children were getting very distressed about the media coverage of the suicides, as English newspapers were running front-page stories with pictures and details that the families had not released to them. When it was revealed that this info had been lifted off the children’s social networking sites the parents became highly critical of the newspapers, blaming them for glamorising the suicides by giving it such heavy coverage (which is ironic as up until now the papers had been blaming the social networking sites for causing the same thing).
So the twist in this case is that although the info was published publicly and therefore in the public domain, the people who did so are dead. The parents believe they should have some control over the personal details of their dead children, and while this is an argument likely fuelled by grief more then rationality it still strikes a chord with a lot of other parents across the land who are worried about what their children are posting on the internet.
My own view is that this is something of a generation gap issue, where parents and children view publicly posting information about themselves in different ways. For example, one fellow on the news a while back was talking about his experiences escaping Eastern Germany and his horror at the way kids were posting information against themselves online. Didn’t they know that databases of public information like this could be used as a horrific tool by dictators? An advocate of Social Networking then put to him that the best way to avoid such dictators was for the public to hold control of communication channels like the internet, and prevent government regulation.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Private vs Public
"This seems a little odd, of course. The info you put on
your public profile is just that: public"
Totally agree with you. Just wondering:
If the profile is not set to public but to private, I assume local authorities like the police can go through 'facebook' or 'myspace' to get access to the private profile.
Since the profile is set to private I wonder if the law changes, the info deemed private and it is then illegal to share.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
well, i dont use these services so i cant comment on what technology separates a public from a private profile, but i really dont think that you can consider a "private" profile designation a reasonable barrier to preventing that information from spreading. it just limits the info to those other people you designate, but they easily can redistribute the info. thus, i think there is no difference
[ link to this | view in thread ]