Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can offer great coverage for organizations and companies worldwide. They not only offer exposure for these outlets, they also offer great publicity and capabilities for the little man like you and me.
Unfortunately, in this day and age where everything can be found on the Internet, social media sites need to be careful about how they use personal information to gain a profit. I recently watched a show from MSNBC called “The Facebook Obsession”. It discussed everything from how people can meet their long-lost family members to how advertisers use Facebook to gather information to better reach their target audiences.
Five years ago, I had no idea Facebook would be able to do the things it can today. I also had no qualms about inputting my personal information onto a website where I believed all of my information could be set to private. Years ago, Facebook was a closed site and only people using the website could find you. You could also hide yourself from other users if you wished. Now, Facebook has collaborated with advertisers to allow them to find their target audiences more easily.
Since the start of the site in 2004, Facebook has been caught a number of times breaching the privacy of their users. The most recent was in October of 2010 when they released statements acknowledging that they had breached their users privacy. For a website that has such a large amount of users’ personal information, they should know better. According to an article written by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook’s ability to give advertisers its users’ information was a breach of the users’ privacy. Internet tracking companies were even finding people who had placed their privacy settings on high.
According to the show, “The Facebook Obsession”, advertisers can type in information for an ideal consumer and Facebook will show them who would most likely purchase the advertiser’s product. Once the advertiser has selected the ideal target market, the advertisement they choose will go directly to the targeted consumer’s Facebook page. Of course users have the right to choose whether or not they click on the ad, but the fact advertisers have this capability is wrong.
Not only is privacy an issue with social media sites, libel is a problem as well. According to my ethics class, libel is defamation of an individual. “A defamatory statement is one that holds a person up to public hatred, ridicule, or scorn” and is usually written. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are vulnerable to allowing people to defame others because these sites have status and comment capabilities. In an article from the New York Times, a small town in Missouri resorted to using a website to discuss people’s personal business. Apparently, the website was clamored with negative posts from an anonymous source about the citizens of the small town. Although the posts were meant to cause harm to those they were intended for, not all defamatory statements are written to cause harm. Sometimes cruel things can be said about a person, but the writer may not intend to harm the person’s reputation. Unfortunately, even if one doesn’t mean to cause harm to another, the repercussions can be damaging.
One teacher lost her job for using Facebook to complain about how much she disliked working for the school district she was apart of. According to the episode, “The Facebook Obsession”, she had no idea how the school found out about her complaints. In a world where everyone thinks what they have to say is important or funny, Facebook can be a terrible place to write personal opinions. I always remember my mom telling me, “words will come back to get you in the end,” and now I truly believe her. Nothing is safe on the Internet and we should always be aware of that when we update our status or comment on a friend’s wall.
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