What is the biggest ethical issue we face in Social Media today?
June 25, 2008 by Kristie Wells
A great question that was brought up in the SMC Los Angeles gathering tonight. I can think of one or two issues at hand.
What issue is chomping at your bit?
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I’m worried about the impact anonymity has to impact the digital reputation of others, especially where they have not opted in to that discussion.
In an environment where people are not identifiable and many social media environments are disconnected from the actual product or service delivery, slander has a permanent and widespread distribution via the mahic of the internet.
I’m especially interested in solving this in the health sector, as doctor rating and other sites attract people with an agenda to rate/review folks that haven’t agreed to manage their reputation online.
I think finding means of ensuring that negative representations of individuals online happens with awareness is important– otherwise, its just like the inappropriate reporting of information into a credit score– once its in, you have a permanent negative impact to your ability to go about your life.
Good Question
i have a problem with firms who misrepresent themselves online and try to deceive people by not being up front about their campaign activity, and pretending to be “user” and not a marketer.
social media can be very powerful, but we don’t need to deceive the public in order to do it well, and the firms that do are putting everyone at risk for social media to be viewed as an untrustworthy source in the eyes of consumers.
there is a balance.
[...] is Key 26 06 2008 I came across a relevant question asked over at Social Media Club. The question was “What is the biggest ethical we face in Social Media [...]
Social media, if used correctly, can be a great way to build a good reputation online; however, if you’re not careful, it can destroy it.
In the same vein as reputation, social media presents a kind of rocky challenge in the privacy arena. Do people who post information about themselves online have any expectation of privacy? Should social media sites play a larger role in ensuring the privacy of their users?
Within our own industry, I think information sharing vs. keeping. We’re all about ’sharing’ except when it comes to our monetization secrets. Don’t you think?
Answering b4 plane doors close so it’s brief.
1. Gaming the SEO system to gain rank
2. Underhanded manipulation of product reviews and comments
3. The accumulation of friends with the intention of monetizing them. There are others aspects of this model however that if transparent may well be an advantage of social media, but it has its vulnerabilities.
More later
All the best, great issue Kristie and Chris
Great question.
1. Exposure. In the social environment, we can find out almost anything about anyone. Thin layers of anonymity have already been shown to be penetrable. So what you say about work, boss, lovelife, anxiety, religion, politics, etc. can all come back to haunt you. The illusion of anonymity seduces people to expose much more than they would in any other environment. People will take advantage of that.
2. Using social groups for promotion of ideology, business, or personal exploitation. Face it, the social environment is beautifully designed to promote products or concepts. It is the focus of Community conferences and seminars. But we haven’t really defined the difference between participation and exploitation. It seems it is somewhat policed by the community itself, but it is irregular and arbitrary.
Hey, you can say I brought up the issue.
And, it’s less ethics than relativism.
[...] So with this concern, the recent exchange below and Kristie’s post today about the biggest ethical issue in social media, I thought it was acceptable to do this [...]
This biggest issue I currently see is protecting free speech as it relates to transparency. While some regulation should remain to prevent individuals from unjustly ruining the reputations of other people and companies, a certain level of free speech must always be available to allow individuals to express themselves.
This is especially important in social media as bloggers must be extremely careful about the topics they choose or force serious litigation over what usually is nothing more than honest opinion.
Hopefully over time transparency will become a more accepted ideal and sites like http://www.glassdoor.com will become more of the norm rather than the exception.
Hi Kristie - I am stuck at O’Hare and following a little on Twitter and related comments from this post and a disgruntled SMC member.
I would add to this (not so much a direct answer but more of an execution issue) is that incredible competition for mind share that social media is creating. New services, the stampeded for followers, the perceived need to have a presence everywhere, and the very disjointed nature of the actual results being generated.
It is too much for a person or an organization who actually has work to accomplish, to similarly “staff” all of these outlets. I’ve been wanting to join the SMC for about a year, but it too is in various places, with lots of unanswered questions and stagnant pages. I have been weighing my own energy and attention limits, and becoming more selective about where to focus - it creates a true dilemma in that many of us are in the same sea, swimming around without a destination and with a different idea of which boat to hop on, on any given day.
There is no way I see to stop it, though I am starting to leave messages myself on certain services like “I am here, but don’t expect much as I am more active over [___}.”
Widening the net to listen to more voices. It seems, for now, we are still talking in small groups although the net is wider. But there are many with voices that aren’t using this venue yet.
It shouldn’t stop us from building and communicating, but it should be recognized as a bias of the debate.
Roxanne - you bring up an important question (please re-read the post that Spatially wrote linked above and my comment there) - which is not direct to your question, but as you said, related.
The direct answer to your question is that I have remained undecided and non-commital in regards to where we focus our efforts online for a community. Erica O’Grady started the Ning network, we started the facebook group and fan page and there are many other places (friend feed room and wiki and blog) where we have our presence. In short this social media thing is getting noisier and noisier even for those of us who are doing it. How hard it is for regular non-hyper-connected folks is mind boggling. I have another post on this topic I am writing this week that Kristie and I hit upon on our walk this morning (wait, new idea Haight Street Walks with Chris & Kristie - not as pretty as a beach but…)
So we tried to get a drupal site together with all of our stuff in one place and I failed, the programmers failed and the designer just disappeared. We should have just stuck with a community platform and learned from those lessons what the right thing was going to be, but I was more worried about picking the wrong system and getting stuck with it then I probably should have been. There is no single community system that exists today that meets the needs of the “Association 2.0″ world (oh lord, did I just write that publicly?)
So, I think we should just build it. I have a clear vision for what we need it to do and for how it should be, so we are going to get working on solving this problem this summer… with the new social media club site, we will push for a membership drive (something we havent done because we know we dont have our stuff fully together) and we will provide real deep value to our members… and hopefully set the example for the rest of the associations out there to follow
PS - one of the biggest ethical issues I see, which I just posted to twitter a short while ago is “How do we give bad actors in the ecosystem (exploitative, manipulative, dishonest, rude, etc…) a bad reputation that is more visible for others to know who to take seriously and who to ignore?”
cant make people wear a scarlett letter on their foreheads…
I think what concerns me most is the use of Social Media as a propaganda machine for some rather nefarious groups. I find the ethics of information warfare, especially targeted at impressionable minds to be very concerning. Social Media is helping the ‘fringe’ reach mainstream audiences and I think we must be vigilant and ensure balanced world-views are being instilled in our young people.
[...] of four after all. After my comments on the Social Media Club’s execution, I’ve had a flurry of activity around here, which I wouldn’t have expected and how now some how ended up as a commitment to [...]
Good question, but is there a simple answer? There are hundreds of social sites.People tend to add people as friends to monetize them and also submit their own content to the all the sites, and every single blog post they write. This is a problem.
[...] recently posted this ethical issue question that was brought up during the kick off meeting of SMC Los Angeles and received some interesting [...]
Social media sites that grab the registrant’s mail list (Outlook, LinkedIn, GMail… ) and send an auto-message to all addresses without the registrant’s permission. Take this “spam” issue one step further for the spread of malware and initiating phishing attempts.