As opposed to my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts in which I accept all connections and followers, I have a cap on the number of “friends” I admit into my Facebook world – 100. Admittedly, it is an arbitrary number, but it allows me to make sure that whatever I share on the Book of Face gets to persons I know and trust. Those with thousands of friends astonish me. I find it difficult enough to keep track of the 100. Of course, if I ever took a picture, recorded a video, or wrote a comment that I want the social media world and not just my friends to know, I might consider using the status update menu choice of “Public” so that “anyone on or off Facebook” can see the post.

It is that simple act of clicking and sharing – to your friends and the world – that makes social media unique among other forms of communication that dates from when Sumerian scribes thousands of years ago pressed carefully conceived marks into moist clay. It is doubtful if more than five individuals saw a cuneiform account of a rich person’s inventory of beer – one of the most common reports preserved through the millennia. Jump ahead to today and the mass distribution of messages by anyone with a smartphone, computer, a wifi connection (I’m currently writing this at a local Starbucks), and a free social media account has the unmistakable power to shape public opinions, affect business markets, and alter social customs and cultures. You might even be able to sway a presidential election with entries that contain alternative facts or fake news. Naaaaa. That could never happen.

However, are social media really new? Technologies have often been employed to promote political messages directly to the public by circumventing the usual mass communication media elite. In 1517, only about 70 years after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the commercial printing press, Martin Luther supposedly hammered printed flyers on the wooden doors of religious institutions. He condemned the Church’s pay-to-play practice of indulgences so that the wealthy could pay to enter Heaven despite their earthly sins. Ironically, it was the printing of indulgences using a moveable type press that paid for the construction and elaborate lifestyles of church officials. Despite Luther’s efforts, it wasn’t until 1967 when Pope Paul VI reformed the indulgence system (“How Luther went viral,” 2011).

Viewed as an entertainment medium since its modern introduction within a Parisian theatre by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895, motion pictures were not thought of as persuasive tools until years later. As Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s Herbert Hoover was universally praised for bringing relief to victims after the devastating Mississippi River flood of 1927 in which an area the size of South Carolina was destroyed by the rising water. After President Calvin Coolidge declined to run for a second term, Hoover, largely on the strength of his positive, mainstream media publicity decided he would aim for the position. His campaign for president was called “the first modern presidential race” as the relatively new medium of motion pictures was employed for the first time to promote a candidate. One 43-minute silent film, Herbert Hoover: Master of Emergencies (2014), was “played in communities across [the] country to remind voters of all that Hoover had done to make life better for those in need.” The documentary, considered the first campaign film in U.S. history, featured Hoover’s efforts to bring relief to the flood victims. Consequently, he handily defeated the Democratic candidate Al Smith by a landslide 58.2 percent of the popular vote and achieved 357 electoral votes more than Smith. However, his approval rating was short-lived. After America plunged in 1929 into the Great Depression and press reports correctly categorized him as an aloof and clueless leader, his reputation was forever sullied (Lester, 2009).

After the first American radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania began its broadcasts in 1920, President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 bypassed politicized newspapers largely owned by his opponents who controlled the slant of news stories and published critical editorial columns to speak directly through the radio medium to the American public in 30 occasional “fireside chats” (“The Fireside Chats,” 2017). With his plain language and calm speaking style, Roosevelt convinced listeners that his controversial policies were best for the nation despite what they read in the Press with its biased reporting and fake news. Sound familiar? The Preservation Board of the Library of Congress noted that the recordings were “an influential series of radio broadcasts in which Roosevelt utilized the media to present his programs and ideas directly to the public and thereby redefined the relationship between the President and the American people.”

Although the ability to send crude facsimile or “fax” messages predates telephone technology, it wasn’t until the Xerox Corporation in 1964 introduced telephone-based fax machines that the communication device started to become commercially viable. About 20 years later, computer-based fax networks allowed internet-based connections for mass broadcasts, often known as “junk faxes” with the content the same as sales flyers left on a front door. However, politically savvy fax users also realized that substantial messages could be sent and received around the world. By 1989 the technology had advanced far enough so that student organizers used fax machines to communicate China’s anti-democratic policies and gathering times for protests. The futurist David Houle (2009) notes that

In offices near Tiananmen Square and in universities there were fax machines. Demonstrators used the technology to get the word out to the world. Much more importantly, the world responded, sending faxes by the hundreds, letting the demonstrators know that the whole world was watching.

As the Chinese government controlled traditional broadcast and print outlets, leaders failed to realize the impact of an analog print sending device connected to a landline telephone combined with activists who understood the power of crowdsourcing.

Another technology used to circumvent traditional media outlets was email. After World War II, a political “Cold War” between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics commenced. Its most terrifying moment was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when it was discovered that the Soviet Union was storing nuclear weapons on the island nation 90 miles from Key West, Florida. Concerned that there might be a nuclear war in which major cities would be destroyed, the U.S. military started to consider alternative communication methods (“The invention of the internet,” 2017). With the help of the RAND Corporation, a governmental think tank, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) started to discuss a communications network via computers. In 1969 the first email message was sent between researchers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto using a computer network called the ARPANET. Detailed at the beginning of Werner Herzog’s 2016 documentary film Lo and Behold Reveries of the Connected World (2016), UCLA Computer Science Professor Leonard Kleinrock wanted to send the message, “login,” but was only able to enter the first two letters before the system crashed.

During the 1970s, powerful IBM and other mainframe computers were popular at government, business, and university research sites around the world. With all the activity generated by these machines, scientists soon realized that they needed communications links among these centers so that computer operators could transfer data and talk with each other electronically. Consequently, more and more computer users started using the ARPANET for work-related and personal messages. By 1983, the system had become so popular that it was divided into two – the original ARPANET for university use and MILNET for the military. When satellite links were added to the system, international communication became possible. ARPANET’s name was changed to the International Network, or the internet (Lester, 2017). By far the most popular feature provided by this early version of the internet was email. In 1986 Eric Thomas (2017), an engineering student at a university in Paris, created software that automatically subscribed and maintained users for an electronic mailing list known as a “listserv.” Soon, politicians, academics, marketing agents, and others used listservs for large-scale messaging in order to spark discussions on almost any topic and to influence public opinion and policy separate from the usual media routes – a digital version of fax messages.

In 1990, two Tims, Berners-Lee and Cailliau used a NeXT computer while working for the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland (“History of the web,” 2017). They developed a computer language called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that created files that could be accessed from the internet. In 1991 HTTP was used for the first browser that Berners-Lee called the WorldWideWeb. By 1993, interest in the internet expanded tremendously because of what was called its killer app – the Mosaic software program. Marc Andreesson and Eric Bina developed the browser while students at the University of Illinois and made accessing and downloading internet files that contained still and moving pictures with audio as simple as clicking a computer’s mouse.

Given the history of attempts at social communication through the technology available at the time, it can be argued that our use of social media is revolutionary, not evolutionary. The way we use this communication technology and the messages’ effect on worldwide culture is a logarithmic leap. The fact that someone with a computer, an account, and an opinion can mass communicate an idea and influence hundreds of thousands of others can be looked at as a gift or burden makes social media an unexpected byproduct of the technological transformation known as the internet and the web.

The Web and Social Revolution

With the web came the revolution in communication, as profound and prolific as the one started in the fifteenth century by Gutenberg – social media. As an introduction to this part of the chapter it is important to parse the two words in the title. “Social” relates to an informal gathering of like-minded individuals who are part of a particular group with cultural participation that might include persons by class, education, gender, ethnicity, interest, race, politics, religion, and/or others. “Media,” the plural form of a particular “medium,” is also a common word that relates to print, broadcast, and screen forms of mass communication – such as magazines, movies, newspapers, radio, television, and computers. With traditional media outlets, the cost in time and money that it takes to have a major influence over the public’s mind is enormous and largely prohibitive. However, when the terms social and media are combined with the web, the concept of individuals within a discrete group based on a particular cultural topic can have an unexpected impact on the rest of society simply because the barriers of mass distribution of a message are lifted – almost anyone with web access, a computer, and an opinion can become a social media star. Even a former reality television personality with a Twitter account, a penchant toward self-aggrandizing, and a habit of waking early in the morning pissed at his critics can upset the world’s daily news cycle.

Many credit social media for propagating political information, demonstration times, and news reports about the Arab Spring democratic movement. Beginning in Tunisia in 2010, revolutionary spirit spread to several Maghreb and Middle East countries. Often dubbed the Twitter or Facebook Revolution because of the extensive use of those platforms to get the word out to supporters, other popular communications technologies available on smartphones, emails, and YouTube videos connected followers as well. Live television coverage by Al Jazeera and other networks of the large gathering and violence in Tahrir Square in Cairo and the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul also helped to inspire protesters. However, popular author Malcolm Gladwell discounted social media’s role in these rebellions. He argued that a platform like Facebook is a low risk form of activism that allows users to voice their support without actually getting directly involved. In addition, instead of a top-down hierarchical process, social media spread messages laterally without a clear leader or method for achieving consensus when decisions were needed. As proof, as soon as there was a military crack-down on the protesters, the movement lost steam (Stepanova, 2011).

Nevertheless, as showed by the 2016 Black Lives Matter protests, the 2017 Women’s Marches in Washington, DC and throughout the world, as well as demonstrations at several airports in response to President Trump’s controversial executive order on Muslim immigration, the role of social media in organizing such public protests should not be denied or discounted.

The Rise of Fake News

Social media staples such as texting to friends, sharing pithy observations, updating a status, uploading a picture, and so on is almost always noncontroversial and ethical. Unfortunately, the 2016 presidential campaign demonstrated how fabricated posts easily manipulate the media and the public with President Trump repeatedly labeling traditional news sources, without evidence, as phony. However, many news reports were fabricated. Fake news accounts from some social media websites were comprised of fictionalized accounts and contained invented quotations, digitally altered photographs and video, and presented within a graphics layout made to appear credible. For hedonistic, attention-getting, and non-satiric purposes, these politically motivated producers created “news” in order to sway public opinion. What would motivate someone to go to the trouble to create a constant stream of fictitious stories? NPR reporter Laura Sydell tracked down a prolific fake news writer. He turned out to be Jestin Coler, a liberal Democrat from California (Pollak, 2016). Coler explained,

The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly false or fictional stories, and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction.

To be clear, fake news whether from established journalism entities or from the mind of an entrepreneur-minded blogster is wrong.

Picture and caption manipulations have a long history of contributing to the fake news genre. A 1928 campaign picture of Herbert Hoover and his running mate was faked because Hoover refused to pose with the vice-presidential candidate, Charles Curtis. Life magazine revealed a composite photograph, produced by a rival politician, of a Maryland Democrat running for office that looked like he was chatting with a Communist leader. The image was actually the result of two separate photographs. The image was widely distributed among the electorate. The Democrat lost the election. Truth was again a victim during a famous case of a man stuck in a cavern. Floyd Collins was a man who wanted to build his own amusement park (“The Floyd Collins tragedy,” n.d.). In 1925, he became trapped while exploring Sand Cave a few miles from the famous, Mammoth Cave in rural Kentucky. For 17 days, rescue workers attempted to free Collins, but without success. He died from starvation. Fifty reporters on the scene turned Collins into a national martyr. More than 20,000 people from 16 states jammed into the area after reading the newspaper articles. In the 1951 movie originally titled, Ace in the Hole, subsequently changed to The Big Carnival, director Billy Wilder critically presented the side-show atmosphere surrounding the hole in the ground. Competition was intense among journalists on the scene to get interviews and pictures no other newspaper had. William Eckenberg, a photographer for The New York Times, learned that a farmer had a picture of Collins taken ten days earlier while inside another cave. Eckenberg found the picture, made a copy and sent it to New York. Many papers across the country used the picture. Fake news.

But what if the photograph or message I want to send to the world is not accurate, misleading, or worse, a known lie? How do ethical communicators respond to such behavior? Recent examples do not offer much consolation that this issue is easily resolved. Nevertheless, the correct ethical response to an unethical action is one of the most interesting aspects about studying ethics – what individual cultures and whole societies judge as positive or negative changes throughout time and because of technological innovations. In our attention culture sparked by the widespread use of smartphones with alerts that impel us to check compulsively our collection of social media apps, the fact that the image or story is true or false is less important than it gets us to view a page with advertisements.

We tend to forgive faked news images and stories if the purpose is largely for entertainment. One of the most infamous hoaxes was Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” 1938 radio broadcast in which thousands of listeners believed Martians had landed in New Jersey (“Welles scares nation,” 2017). The deception was enhanced by the use of reporting techniques popular at the time that were used to convince a naïve public of the veracity of the show. Although criticized, Welles apologized and was soon hired to direct one of the most acclaimed motion pictures in history – Citizen Kane. Another example are April Fool photographic fakes that were popular in many city and college newspapers. Curtis MacDougall (1958) in his book, Hoaxes, detailed several instances where newspapers published such images as giant sea creatures, Viking ships, and a man supposedly flying by his own lung power. The Reading, Pennsylvania Eagle-Times used double printing techniques to show the Concorde SST aircraft landing at the Reading airport, an oil tanker cruising down the Schuylkill River, and two children playing with a giant wishbone from a 750-pound turkey. And if you’re of a certain age, you remember staying up late listening to radio programs that featured aural (“Number Nine” backwards) and visual evidence (the cover art for the album “Abbey Road”) that the Beatles’ Paul McCartney had died in a car crash (Yoakum, 2000). Eerie. If we didn’t enjoy being fooled now and then, there wouldn’t be novels, plays, movies, and television.

But some producers of website content have other motives than simply spreading joy. The McCartney death hoax is listed by Time magazine as one of the “world’s most enduring conspiracy theories.” The other nine mentioned on the website are the JFK assassination, the 9/11 cover-up, Area 51 and the aliens, secret societies that control the world, the moon landings, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Holocaust revisionism, the CIA and AIDS, and the reptilian elite (this last one has to be true) (“Conspiracy theories,” 2016). Other unproven theories include such diverse topics as water fluoridation, genetically modified crops, vaccines, and climate change. With sophisticated, graphically-rich websites, evidence in the form of still and moving images, testimonials from seemingly knowledgeable and credible experts, conspiracy bloggers have taken a page from Orson Welles’ playbook – if the presentation seems authentic, it will be perceived as true (“The Conspiracy Blog,” 2017). Propagators of these theories count on the fact that most users don’t have the time to conduct the research in order to know for sure if the information found on the web is fact or fiction.

Conspiracy theories aside, instances of phony news reaching the social media mainstream are far too common and have become normative. One of the most egregious examples occurred in 2016. As Jodi Jacobson (2016) reported in Rewire, an online publication,

During the [presidential] election, sites like True Pundit, State of the Nation, and the New Nationalist were responsible for creating vicious conspiracy theories, and releasing them to be picked up and amplified on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other channels by the countless followers of these and other shadowy sites.

But which is worse: Creating a false account or passing it along?

A fictionalized story from True Pundit caught the attention of the traditional news media after the content was retweeted by retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, the first national security advisor for President Trump. Flynn resigned his position after it was discovered he misrepresented the subject of a telephone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to Vice President Pence. Nevertheless, Flynn’s tweet content read:

U decide – NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc… MUST READ! https://t.co/O0bVJT3QDr

(General Flynn (@GenFlynn) November 3, 2016)

The weblink takes you to the True Pundit fake news site that details sexual allegations against Bill and Hillary Clinton supposedly being investigated by police officials. About a month later Edgar Welch armed with a loaded assault rifle, inspired by the phony information, entered Comet Ping Pong, a Washington DC pizza restaurant and fired shots in order, he thought, to save children that were inside and used as Hillary sex slaves. Luckily no one was hurt and he was arrested and later convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. Nevertheless, this incident should act as a cautionary tale about fake news accounts – there are many who read stories on blogs and retweeted on Twitter that believe the reports must be true because they fit their view of the world.

For visual communicators, fake news should be a major concern because images are often used to support biased and untrue views. Laura Mallonee (2016) writing for Wired magazine details several examples of photographic content manipulated by the words associated with them. During the 2016 presidential campaign, an image of tour buses in Austin shows that Democrats brought in protesters to a Trump rally in a fake Tweet while a picture of Hillary Clinton slipping on steps becomes evidence of her failing health in a Breitbart blog account. Months after the election Clinton revealed that one of the main reasons she lost was because of fake stories shared through Facebook that were provided by the Russian government in collusion with Americans (“Hillary Clinton says,” 2017). “The other side was using content,” she said in a speech, “that was just flat-out false and delivering it in a very personalized way.” Co-founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, in a story published in The Telegraph newspaper noted that he thought it was “‘crazy’ to think that fake news on the site had influenced the election in any way.”

Full-frame and non-manipulated photographs should be considered ethically neutral if they are the product of a camera controlled by a visual reporter aware of her inherent biases. Cameras do not care what is recorded by their technology. However, it is the words associated with them through captions, articles, and the stories we make up about them in our minds that cause ethical dilemmas. Editors, reporters, social media managers, and readers should be more vigilant in their fact-checking skills so that fake news and “alternative facts” are exposed for what they are – lies. As a member of the general public one of the best sources to discover the truth about questionable stories and images is Snopes (2017). Known as the “Urban Legends Reference Pages,” the website identifies facts from fiction in news accounts and popular myths as it debunks rumors and fake news reports. Begun in 1995 by David and Barbara Mikkelson and named after characters in William Faulkner stories, Snopes receives an estimated eight million visitors a month.

President Donald Trump’s fascination with Twitter is well documented as he communicates to the public and sidesteps traditional media outlets to offer his opinions, often critical, of events and individuals during the 2016 campaign and throughout his reign (“Donald J. Trump,” 2017). Many journalists decried his 140-character missives as uninformed at best and outright lies at worse. In 2017 bipartisan criticism was leveled against Trump for his personal attacks directed at MSNBC journalists (“Mika Brzezinski,” 2017). To help readers who may question the veracity of Trump’s farumps, The Washington Post created an add-on for web browsers called “RealDonaldContext” that “Adds context to Trump’s not-quite-accurate tweets.”

Other notable examples of fake news include Pope Francis’ endorsement of candidate Trump, Hillary Clinton sold arms to ISIS terrorists, Queen Elizabeth invited President Trump to Buckingham Palace, and Trump’s threat to deport Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda to Puerto Rico. Journalists sometimes make mistakes. That’s why one of the most entertaining parts of a newspaper is the “Corrections” section. But making, admitting, and correcting an honest error and creating a false story in the hope of gaining eyeballs or hits to a blog to help sway an election are two fundamentally different actions. Unfortunately, as consumers of the media learn to use online tools so only stories that support a particular political stance are displayed, fact and fiction become inconsequential distinctions. For many, though, nothing the media reports is now trusted.

An editorial in The Dallas Morning News included a 5-point checklist that should be used to resist fake news items (“Tips for telling truth,” 2016). According to the Texas journalists, before you share a juicy Tweet:

Concerns with Public Commentary

Unfortunately, fake news is not the only concern of social media. Examples of poor etiquette, unethical behavior, and illegal activities are almost the norm whenever users evoke a hedonistic rather than a utilitarian, veil of ignorance, golden rule, or golden mean philosophy. When personal, economic, and/or political motivations dictate the content and tone of a message, intimidation and violent acts dominate critical discussions of the media.

Text messages have been known to cause harm and even death to others (O’Hara, 2017). Upset over the way journalist Kurt Eichenwald covered stories, ex-marine John Rivello sent a tweet that included a pulsating, epilepsy-inducing image that induced a seizure in Eichenwald. In 2017 a Texas grand jury labeled the GIF picture as a “deadly weapon” and indicted Rivello. Also in 2017 a Massachusetts judge found Michelle Carter guilty of involuntary manslaughter after text messages she sent to her former boyfriend convinced him to commit suicide. She was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison (Sanchez and Lance, 2017).

Since the early days of the web, media entities, in an effort to attract users to their online sites, provided ways for readers to express their comments about a particular story or topic. This noble and utilitarian feature was produced with good, yet naïve intentions. Many editors eventually shut down the service after comments and images from anonymous posters turned hateful. For example, many view the hard-hitting, investigative reporting online and television news service Vice (2017) as an example of the future of journalism. And yet editor-in-chief Jonathan Smith (2016) decided to remove the comment section from online stories because of their divisive content. “Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms,” Smith admits, “where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and the more reasoned responses [are] drowned out in the noise.” Perhaps a solution to bad behavior is to prevent it from happening, and yet such a drastic action seems antithetical to a philosophy that embraces a free exchange of opinions no matter how uninformed or cruel. A golden mean or middle way compromise might include a restriction in which commentators and image uploaders must employ their actual names. The vetting of user accounts to assure compliance is possible with advances in security software. Knowing that an inflammatory comment or image, whether still or moving can be traced to its source would be an incentive, perhaps, to play nice. And then I woke up.

One reaction to the darkest corners of social media is akin to the mood expressed by the shaky camera and black and white footage of a young camper trying to protect himself from an evil force by facing a rock wall in the penultimate scene of the 1999 horror film The Blair Witch Project. However, as a way to avoid controversial content, many view such a strategy as ineffective and simplistic. The list and description of all the gruesome images available through social media could fill several chapters in this book. Photographs of celebrity autopsies such as Kurt Cobain, suicide victims as with a close-up of Robin Williams’ distorted face, a gruesome car accident victim described in Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold, and despicable videos that show beheadings, immolation, and torture are easily found on social media sites with a few well-chosen keywords. In fact, try this yourself. Type “beheadings, immolation, and torture” in Google and you will have the opportunity, as of this writing, to see more than 450,000 entries with the first four intriguing topics as “Islamic State Burns 4 Captives Alive,” “Beheadings, Torture, Machine Gun Deaths,” “Beheadings and Torture as Fresh Riots Break Out in Brazilian Prison,” and “Afghan Woman’s Beheading Latest in Alarming Trend.”

But hey, it’s the world we have inherited and inhabit. If you want to see the worst behavior humanity has to offer, be my guest. However, the ethical dilemma comes when the images show up without a warning about their content. Twitter offers a blanket warning for all who have an account: Beside the restriction that users “may not use pornographic or excessively violent media in your profile image or header image,” anyone can post “inflammatory content” as long as the “graphic content” is marked as “sensitive media.” Furthermore, “When content crosses the line into gratuitous images of death, Twitter may ask that you remove the content out of respect for the deceased.” Therefore, Twitter may or may not ban content that a reasonable person may find upsetting. As a golden mean solution, Twitter advises that a user simply “block and ignore” the offensive account. For Facebook, the warning procedure is a little different. Although the social media site bans material “shared for sadistic pleasure or to celebrate or glorify violence,” news and documentary videos that depict gruesome content are included with the sentences, “Videos that contain graphic content can shock, offend and upset. Are you sure you want to see this?” Although Facebook allows members as young as 13 years old, the content of these videos are restricted to those who have self-identified as being at least 18. However, psychologist Dr. Arthur Cassidy (2017) evokes a categorical imperative perspective as he advocates a total ban on such videos. He reasons that resourceful younger users will find ways to circumvent such restrictions and that the watching of such material “has the potential to influence maladaptive behavior in those who might have the potential to become aggressors themselves.” As with an electric light shining on a moonless night, the moth is compelled to pursue its destructive behavior.

Social media were originally created so that the public could easily share personal stories, opinions, and pictures and (let’s get real) as a mechanism for corporations to gain marketing information about consumers so as to better sell their products and services. And as with all communication media (Alexander Bell never thought that telephone callers could capture Pokémon characters while being placed on Hold), the initial conception has morphed into an uncontrollable, unregulated, and uncomfortable collection of raves, rants, and rudeness. What is a grown-up to do? Simple. Do not contribute or share examples of bad behavior. Do not create or share unsubstantiated and questionable alternative facts in the form of art or copy regardless if produced for parodic or political reasons. And do not keep silent if you are offended by someone else’s post. Simple? Kant’s categorical imperative is never an easy philosophy to follow. Perhaps another perspective is required. Use the golden rule philosophy and treat others, as you would like to be treated. Simple.

Case Studies

Case Study One

In the 2016 American presidential election, many commentators suggested that candidate Donald Trump broke all the rules. Among his many purported innovations was his use of Twitter to reach voters – by the time he was inaugurated, Trump had more than 20 million followers, and many of his most controversial tweets were spread and debated by the mainstream media, as well. But on closer inspection, his Twitter following might not have been as large as it seemed. Closer analysis reveals that many of his followers are actually bots, spam accounts, and other dead accounts that don’t actually correspond to real people. (In fairness, all celebrity accounts acquire these kinds of zombie-like followers.) Many others came from overseas, and may or may not have been valid. Of course, any U.S. president would likely develop an international following, although Trump often bragged that his followers were all voters, something that would not be possible for non-Americans. In all, it seems that Trump really had more like 3 million U.S. Twitter followers – far more than most people, but nowhere near 20 million.

Salkowitz, R. (January 17, 2017). “Trump’s 20 million Twitter followers get smaller under the microscope.” Forbes. Accessed June 30, 2017 from https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2017/01/17/trumps-20-million-twitter-followers-get-smaller-under-the-microscope/#1bb124c64407.

See Appendix B for the 10-Step Systematic Ethical Analysis Form.

Case Study Two

When it comes to news, what’s most important? Getting the story to readers as quickly as possible, or making sure readers only read the story written by your own journalists? That’s quickly becoming the question facing newsrooms around the world. The problem is this: When one reporter gets a scoop or writes an interesting story, the first thing she or he usually does is send out a tweet about the headline. The fastest way to share the story is to retweet the news. But that means sending readers or viewers to the competition, potentially losing audience. Because of this, some publications have begun to tell their reporters and writers they can only tweet about their own stories, or stories that support their own media sources. This was the approach of Sky News in Great Britain, who told its journalists to stick to their own beat, and only share their own stories or those of other Sky reporters.

Cellan-Jones, R. (February 2012). “Tweeting the news.” BBC News. Accessed June 30, 2017 from http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16946279.

See Appendix B for the 10-Step Systematic Ethical Analysis Form.

Case Study Three

It’s easy to think that everybody gets their news online these days. Turn on the TV and you’re sure to hear news about Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other forms of social media. But read that last sentence again. How did it start? “Turn on your TV …” A 2016 study published by the Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of American adults said they “often” get news from television, while only 38 percent said they “often” get news online (25 percent said radio and 20 percent said newspapers). But look behind those numbers and the story gets a bit more complicated. Older adults are the ones watching TV for news: 72 percent of those between 50 and 72 years old said they watched television for news; moving up to 85 percent of those over 65. For those under between 18 and 49, it was only 50 percent. Still, 50 percent is a lot of people. It reveals that there remains, even with the rise of mobile platforms, a large number of individuals who like to watch the news.

Mitchell, A., Gottfried, J., Barthel, M., and Shearer, E. (July 7, 2016). “The modern news consumer.” Pew Research Center. Accessed June 30, 2017 from http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/.

See Appendix B for the 10-Step Systematic Ethical Analysis Form.

Annotated Sources

Dwyer, A. (2013). “‘Twethics’: A brief analysis of Twitter ethics in public relations.” Commpro. Accessed June 30, 2017 from https://www.commpro.biz/twethics-a-brief-analysis-of-twitter-ethics-in-public-relations/.

Dwyer looks at the ethics of Twitter, and divides users into four groups: the paid tweeter, the company tweeter, the out-of-context tweeter, and the ghost-tweeter. She goes into depth on each one of these sub categories, questioning the ethical implications of each type. She ends with a short discussion on the importance of transparency in tweeting.

Hille, S. and Bakker, P. (2014). “Engaging the social news user.” Journalism Practice, 8(5), 563–572.

Journalists can interact easily with their readers through comments on their articles. This study analyzed comments left on 62 Dutch newspapers and compared the comments left on the newspapers’ Facebook pages with the comments left on the newspaper’s webpage. They found fewer comments on Facebook pages, but they hypothesize that the lack of anonymity on Facebook is responsible for the higher quality of comments left.

Paulussen, S. and Raymond, A.H. (2014). “Social media references in newspapers.” Journalism Practice, 8(5), 542–551.

Modern journalists use social media sites in their news coverage, and this essay examines the relationship between journalists and social media. Through monitoring print editions of two Flemish newspapers, the authors monitored how often Facebook, Twitter or YouTube was either mentioned ore cited as a source. They found that the use of social media is common, but it is not the dominant source of information for journalists.

Thériault, A. (2015). “The dubious ethics of Twitter mining.” The Establishment. Accessed June 30, 2017 from https://theestablishment.co/the-dubious-ethics-of-twitter-mining-ce13e56e9fcb.

This author argues against media outlets using individual’s tweets to publish stories. The author argues this allows the outlet to make a profit off the work of others, and simultaneously gives the user a huge amount of visibility.

References

“The Conspiracy blog.” (2017). Accessed June 30, 2017 from http://theconspiracyblog.com/.

“Conspiracy theories.” (2016). Time. Accessed June 30, 2017 from http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1860871,00.html.

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