Hanna Nieminen

This blog post was produced as part of the course “Social Media, Ideologies, and Ethics in the United States” at the University of Turku.

For many, social media has become a crucial form of connecting with others and communicating about one’s life and worldviews. It is a medium through which we interact, but in this process the channel itself and the meanings users attach to it become a resource. Online comments, statistics, and trends are increasingly incorporated into news stories and articles, but journalists are still expected to adhere to traditional codes of ethics, such as transparency and respect. Sometimes, however, the lines of journalistic ethics are overstepped so blatantly that it becomes unclear if the fault is in the writer, the publisher, or the online environment itself.

One example of an ethics violation is an article published by the American news site Daily Beast in August 2016, in which the writer, who is straight, created a Grindr profile to uncover gay athletes in the Rio de Janeiro Olympic village. The article received immediate backlash, prompting the site to first edit out identifying information and eventually take down the entire article and replace it with a formal apology. The original writer, who did not disclose his role as a journalist to the Grindr users and allegedly used homophobic language in the article, disappeared from the Daily Beast site and his personal social media for seven months before returning to his career publicly.

The Daily Beast case is only a tip of the iceberg of questionable social media journalism and as such is clearly distinguishable as unethical, but unraveling the incident only creates a bundle of new questions. Did the writer not realize that his methods went against several sections of the SPJ (Society of Professional Journalists) Code of Ethics? How did the article pass through the editing process? Why was the publisher’s response to the critique gradual? These questions arise specifically as a reaction to this case, but we could also reflect on the broader theme of this issue: how aware are journalists and the audience of the ethical use of social media as a source, and does the normalization of social media make people numb to its potential violations?

Obvious ethics violations can, in some cases, serve as shock therapy, but incidents of questionable journalism do not always stand out to this degree. As social media has become an everyday tool, it is increasingly easy to forget old lessons of internet safety, of how what you post will be online forever, viewed by whoever, and used for whatever purposes. It can be easy to find peace of mind in the idea of anonymity among the masses. However, our online presence is not meaningless; it is the content. On the other hand, focusing on the online world as the reason for questionable journalism runs the risk of victim blaming. Social media users who engage in their chosen platforms, private or public, under the assumption that they are in a “safe space” where other users are adhering to the rules and norms, should not be blamed for getting caught in an undisclosed social experiment. Journalists who are facing the abundance of resources in social media are under more pressure than ever to consider the globally and universally ethical dimensions of their work.

I believe that in the case of the Daily Beast, the article was a product of multilayered social and ethical blindness to social media as both a source as well as an audience. Social media users have become an inherent part of the cycle of content creation, and to maintain a trust for ethical journalism in social media, both sides should stay informed and critical of what this interactive relationship entails.

Sources:

BBC. 2016. “Rio 2016: Daily Beast ‘sorry for outing gay athletes’”. Accessed December 6, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-37058787.