Archive for the ‘Facebook’ Category

Image via WikipediaThe UK’s newspaper watchdog, the PCC, has released the findings of its research into attitudes towards social networking. It found that 78% would change information they publish about themselves online if they thought the material would later be reproduced in the mainstream media. This is a new ethical issue for journalists, as Facebook [...]

Image by gak via FlickrFans of the cancelled CBC show, Jpod, are planning to emulate the antics of fans across the border to save their beloved programme. A Facebook group has been set up to coordinate a mail-in blitz to CBC in support of Jpod on May 19th. The campaigners are suggested fans send in [...]

The Knight News Challenge describes newspapers as the glue that used to hold communities together. Of course, technology has changed everything. Now, instead, it is not the news media that is providing the online glue, but new players such as Facebook and MySpace. Social media has proved a runaway hit, especially among Canadians. A report [...]

A piece by Slate “outing” Rudy Giuliani’s daughter apparent support for Barack Obama once again raises questions about Facebook. Slate reports that that according to the 17-year-old Caroline Giuliani’s Facebook profile, she’s supporting Barack Obama, rather than her father, for president. The magazine was able to see her profile as it was not locked, meaning [...]

The rise of social media poses new ethical dilemmas for journalists. One of these is whether journalists on Facebook should befriend their sources. Adding a source as a “friend” could lead to accusations of bias, but not doing so could risk offending your contact. The CBC has stepped into this ethical morass by instructing its [...]

While Facebook has been attracting the headlines recently and had the chattering classes talking, MySpace has quietly been growing in the UK. Figures from Nielsen/Net Ratings showed that MySpace had 6.5m unique UK visitors in May 2007. This compares to 3.96m for Bebo and 3.2m for Facebook. But there is a twist. MySpace may be [...]

A story from Vancouver illustrates how teens, teachers and parents are still grappling over how to deal with Facebook. In this case, a teenager was expelled from school for setting up a Facebook group in which she said she would kick her teacher. The school saw this as a threat to the teacher and expelled [...]

CBC has admitted that its Facebook experiment has been hijacked by special interest groups, in particular the pro-life/anti-abortion lobby. There were signs that this was going to happen just days after the Great Canadian Wishlist was launched. Tod Maffin, writing in the official Inside the CBC blog, explained how the top wishes were dominated by [...]

Here is a link to an analysis article I wrote on the digital dilemmas that social media poses for journalists for the Journalism Ethics for the Global Citizen at the University of British Columbia. It looks at the ethical issues surrounding digital door-stepping, looking at what happened following the Virginia Tech shootings, when students turned [...]


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This blog is run by Professor Alfred Hermida, an award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator.

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