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 that anyone with access to the Harvard or Trinity School networks could see her detailed
PDF 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 journalists to avoid adding sources or contacts as friends. A policy document distributed to CBC
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 leading the way in visitor numbers, but its social networking rivals are proving to 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 the student. Her father maintains it was just a joke. The story shows how what
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 political causes associated with Conservative or right-wing groups. One of the people behind the idea,
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 to social networking sites to share experiences and express their grief. Here’s an extract: Reporters