By Dr. Jane Marcellus, Associate Professor
Middle Tennessee State University
Are posts on social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace public or private? Should journalists quote them? What about linking to someone’s social media site in a news story? Does it matter if the person is very young?
These questions have come up in a listserv discussion I’m part of. The original post concerned a local paper’s coverage of a 17-year-old charged in a vehicular homicide case. The paper linked to the 18-year-old victim’s MySpace page, which included photos of him and the motorcycle he was riding when he was killed (http://www.themonitor.com/articles/reflect-28475-bravo-ricardo.html).
A subsequent post concerned a different case, in which a paper had quoted Facebook posts praising a student who had died. The student’s friends were angry; they considered the posts private.
Good reporting or invasion of privacy? The answer isn’t obvious.
Certainly, what we post on a Web site is public, and most of us have heard the reminders that workplace e-mail is not necessarily private–even if we don’t heed the warnings. But it seems that social media exist in a liminal zone, where the traditional difference between mass media and point-to-point communication is not clear. In fact, that’s part of the attraction of Facebook and MySpace. They’re designed to let users create, paradoxically, a public persona of the private self, a “spectacle of the private.”
Of course, Facebook lets users choose different privacy settings. But that’s no guarantee, since these sites are designed to link not only “friends” but friends of friends–people we don’t even know. If you’ve got something private to say, social media sites are not the place to say it.
Still, does that make them okay as news sources?
Even before this came up, Facebook reminded me of eavesdropping. I wouldn’t think of using it as a source in reporting, any more than I would report on other conversations overheard in person. In fact, fifteen years or so ago, I found myself waiting for a friend in a restaurant, seated very close to an environmental activist who had just been released from prison. What I overheard about her time in prison would have made an insightful feature. Should I quote what I overheard? It was clear to me then that I shouldn’t, although she was speaking loudly in a public place. I was intrigued enough to try to contact her, but she didn’t return my calls. I felt like the stereotypical rude reporter for having inadvertently invaded her private conversation, and it wasn’t exactly Watergate, so I let it go.
One response I’ve heard to this is that digging up information is what reporters do, and that this is a new world, with new rules. That’s too easy. While we haven’t had Facebook and MySpace before recent years, we have had communication technologies that allowed us to “overhear” conversations. Ham radio and telephone party lines come to mind, with the latter often remembered as a source for the grapevine.
I do think people need to be smart enough to know that what they post on social media–like what they say loudly in restaurants–may be “overheard” by reporters. But reporters need to know when to draw the line. We need to think each decision through carefully. Is the story worth it? Will the person’s social media friends–and their friends–be harmed? If the person is a minor, or otherwise very vulnerable in some way, that should be a consideration, too.
Beyond those questions, there’s the issue of accuracy. Without accuracy, you don’t have reporting–you have gossip.
With new media, answers that were once obvious may take a little more thought. And that’s all the more reason to ground our students in critical thinking and conceptual courses such as ethics before they leave our programs.
Jane Marcellus teaches media history, feature writing and cultural studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research focuses on media history and gender, with a particular interest in representation of employed women in the 1920s and 1930s. Her work has been published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, American Journalism, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Journal of Popular Culture, and Journal on Excellence in College Teaching.