Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Legal and Ethical Social Media

Legal and Ethical social media

When posting on social media, it is essential to be cautious that your statements not be offensive or unethical. There is also an issue of copywriting or even giving false or damaging information. According to Christina Vassiliou Harvey, Mac R. McCoy, and Brook Sneath in their article titled 10 Tips for Avoiding Ethical Lapses When Using Social Media there are certain things you can do to avoid legal and ethical issues while using social media to protect yourself and maintain face. I will only highlight a few of these steps that I feel most applicable to the every day social media user. According to the article it is always important to “avoid making false or misleading statements.” We see this all the time in social media. People making reputation-damaging claims about certain people that many times are completely false. The other point I would like to illustrate in this post is to “not disclose private or confidential information.” This is good advice for attorneys and other legal respondents, but it is also good for friends and family to follow the same advice. Social media is out there for everyone to see so be careful of what you post.

The next article I would like to discuss is on USAToday titled Social Media Raises privacy and ethics issues by Sharon Jayson. One of the findings illustrated in her article was especially fascinating to me. “Some of Facebook's research on user behavior found that 71% of people drafted at least one post that they never posted. Another analyzed 400,000 posts and found that children's communication with parents decreases in frequency from age 13 but then rises when they move out.” This outlines the ethical and legal issues social media can bring. Legal because people are using posts that are not originally theirs and are not giving credit to the original authors and ethical because children who use social media are less likely to have healthy and constant interactions with their parents.


1 comment:

  1. I also read the article Social Media Raises privacy and ethics issues. great recap!

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