2012

Best Practices for Bloggers: Dimensions for Consideration

Best Practices for Bloggers: Dimensions for Consideration presents a set of questions to consider as you construct, update, or maintain your blog. We outline some best practices and offer suggestions for ethical blogging behavior. These are not proscriptive guidelines meant to restrict creativity or freedom of expression online; they are instead created to give current and would-be bloggers some idea of the kinds of ethical challenges they will need to address at some point during their tenure.

Best Practices for Bloggers: Dimensions for Consideration is presented below in its entirety, and is also available as a stand-alone page (.html) or for download (.pdf). Please feel free to leave feedback and suggestions about this document using the form below.

Best Practices for Bloggers: Dimensions for Consideration Adrienne L. Massanari & Meghan Dougherty Center for Digital Ethics & Policy (digitalethics.org)

Blogs are diverse in their subject matter. There are blogs about a broad range of topics using a broad range of tones and styles to give the site character. They have near universal reach across topics. Despite their broad ranging scope, blogs share some formal qualities and elements that make them stand out among other kinds of web sites. Blogs are web sites with regularly updated entries in the form of posts with the most recently updated information at the top of the page (Walker Rettberg, 2008). Posts may contain text, links, images, and/or other media such as video clips, sound files, or Flash movies. Beyond the basic unit of the post, other blogging elements include post titles, timestamps, blogrolls, and ‘about’ pages. These formal qualities and elements compose a minimal definition of blogs. This definition is not exhaustive, nor is it exclusive. To alleviate this confusion, Jill Walker Rettberg (2008) defines blogs as a medium itself, rather than a genre within the overarching single medium of the Internet. For the purposes of this discussion we agree. Bloggers choose to work within a set of technical affordances and constraints enabled by blogging software (Walker Rettberg, 2008). From there, bloggers and their readers may recognize different genres of blogging in the medium. Each choice of medium, then genre, limits or directs the blogger toward certain style and content choices. There are many exceptions, and there are many opportunities to challenge these directions in blog style.

In this guide for best practices in blogging, we propose several dimensions for navigating the affordances and constraints of the medium, the limitations of genre, and the convergences of style. Within each dimension we pose a number of questions to illustrate ethical implications of blogging. Constructing and maintaining a blog, regardless of its genre or style, requires that consequences be considered in the following categories: transparency, attribution, responsibility, face, text, truth, and citizenship.

These categories are not mutually exclusive. Questions are repeated as they take on a different sensibility depending on the approach, and may be answered differently in different categories. There is no set of best practices that will at once cover all genres and styles of blogs and hold enough definition to provide clear guidance. So, we offer this set of dimensions and questions to consider.

Transparency

Many blogs encourage a level of transparency not found in other media. Authors can post items much more quickly than in other media (such as newspapers) as Andrew Sullivan (2008) notes, and a sort of conversation often develops between the blog’s readers and its author(s). Blogs offer the ability to link to primary sources while offering the author’s own commentary on a particular topic, thus encouraging audience members to draw their own conclusions regarding the topic under discussion. While transparency for different blogs will vary by purpose and genre, we’ve included a list of questions below that we believe are important for authors to consider as they create and maintain their blogs.

(1) Will my blog be public or private? Depending on the purpose of your blog, you may choose to make it private, or restrict access to it to only a few people. Some organizations (like news outlets) might want to monetize their blog(s) and require sign-in before allowing access. Of course, this will also restrict your potential audience (and may alienate those who view blogs as essentially public forums), so this is an important consideration.

(2) Should I be anonymous, use a pseudonym, or my real name when I blog? For the most part, we recommend using your real name when you blog. This provides additional credibility and accountability for the postings you create, and assures your audience of your willingness to stand behind your writing. However, there are times when using a pseudonym or remaining anonymous may be useful. This is particularly true for blogs where the material being discussed is of a sensitive nature, or where the blogger might face repercussions for the material being posted (for example, posting material about one’s job that might hurt the company’s reputation). It is important to remember that while blogs themselves can be written anonymously, it can be possible to trace the author if care is not taken to anonymize the blog’s DNS (Domain Name System) record, etc.

(3) Will I allow others to comment on my postings? This depends on your blog’s purpose. Again, if it is a personal journal (like many hosted on the LiveJournal website), you may not choose to allow others to comment on your posts. However, this places some artificial limits on your audience and eliminates the participatory nature of blogging, which may not make allow you to reach or grow a wide readership base.

(4) Will I moderate comments on my postings? Comments can be important ways for your audience to communicate with you and with each other. However, depending on the topics you discuss on your blog (and whether or not you are writing as an individual or representing a larger organization or institution), you may decide to have comments sent to you for your approval before they are posted. You may want to moderate for a number of reasons. Comments can run the gamut from insightful, to controversial, to inflammatory, to spam, and everything in between. You may have community standards or legal obligations to control the content available on your blog, so considering how you will handle content posted by others and how you will facilitate dialogue between audience members will be an important consideration. Moderation of this content can take different forms. You may choose to simply approve or disapprove comments as they are submitted, or you may choose to approve all comments with some simple editing that preserves the integrity of two-way conversation without endorsing the particular ideas contained in a comment. For example, the author(s) can disemvowel (removing vowels in the comment) or otherwise mark comments if the blog owner considers them to be inappropriate for the discussion (Please see #16 and #18 below for more on moderating techniques and types of comments you may want to consider moderating). Whatever technique you choose for your blog, a clear policy statement should be posted. In your policy statement, clearly outline the criteria for acceptable and unacceptable commenting behavior, and include a list of consequences for inappropriate commenting (e.g., will the post be edited, deleted, deleted and replaced by a note indicating the reason for deletion, etc?). While moderating ensures that you have final control over what is published on your blog, it means additional time to vet comments and create a lag in the conversation among your audience members.

(5) Should I allow advertising on my site? This depends on a number of factors: the nature of your blog (personal, journalistic, hobby-focused, commercial, etc.); the nature of your audience; and your own comfort level with advertising. Blogs of a more personal nature may be perceived as odd or a bit unauthentic if advertisements are peppered throughout postings about one’s personal life. Hobby-focused and commercial blogs are probably the easiest ones to make the case for advertising, as the former might provide ad space for specific product/services recommended by the blog’s author. Certain commercial blogs might also logically include advertising; however, it is important that blog content provides more value than just promoting the company’s product(s). It’s also important to note that the kind of advertising that appears on your site may be out of your control. For example, while Google AdWords service may allow you to specify categories of ads you’re interested in including, it is unlikely that you will be able to specify or exclude certain products or companies from advertising on your blog. This makes some bloggers uncomfortable, while others do not care. If you choose to accept advertising on your site, we recommend including this information in some sort of disclosure statement.

(6) What about sponsorship or profit-sharing links? Again, this is highly dependent on the kind of blog. Sponsorship can be a good compromise, as it allows a blogger more control over the kind of products and companies s/he is promoting. This is especially useful for hobby-focused blogs where readers might appreciate learning more about the products, services, or resources the blogger finds useful (for example, linking to particular books on Amazon.com where the blogger receives a small percentage of the sales if a person purchases the recommended book). Again, information about this sort of linking practice should be included in a disclosure statement.

(7) What about including a disclosure statement for my blog? We recommend creating an “About” page that includes a brief biography of the blog’s author(s), contact information, and a disclosure statement that includes information about how comments are handled, what (if any) information is tracked about your readers, etc. Be clear about your intentions for blogging. For fiction bloggers, it is important to indicate that the content is fiction, or performative. For financial bloggers, it’s particularly important to provide your audience information about your financial interest in any of the companies that you may blog about. If you author a professional blog, include information about the organizations for which you work/support may help your audience understand your perspective and give them a better sense of how this shapes your perspective.

(8) Should I track visitors to my blog? Collecting basic information about your visitors using web tracking tools (where your visitors are coming from, referring pages, etc.) is common practice online, and it’s likely that your audience is used to this sort of information being collected about them elsewhere online. We recommend that you create a specific list of the ways in which you track your audience and add this to your disclosure statement so it’s easily accessible if individuals have questions.

Attribution

Attribution practices in blogging help readers, sponsors, and bloggers evaluate information found on blogs. Different readers look for different things in different types of blogs to evaluate the veracity of what’s posted there. Attribution is how a blogger situates his or her work in reference to other work – how he or she points to others in creating their own statements. The attribution styles reflect practices common within different genres of blog. For example, more formal attribution and citation styles are employed by journalism blogs. These blogs borrow from journalistic writing styles in other print and broadcast media. More casual styles of attribution are used in other blog genres borne from personal diary or scrapbook style blogs. How you choose to notate attribution in your blog depends on the community you want your blog to fit into. Regardless of what style or technique you choose, attribution calls for reflection on how and why you may point to others’ work within your own.

(1) What are my responsibilities to my sources? Sources can be considered two ways: as informants, or as source material. Balancing the protection of your informant with your responsibility to reveal information to your readers is difficult. Your source may want to remain anonymous, or may insist upon proper attribution for the work you are borrowing. If you are bringing information into the public for the first time (e.g., posting comments from a personal interview), we recommend that you ask permission. People perceive a difference between circulating information privately or offline and circulating information online. Your source may not be comfortable being named on your blog. Keep in mind that identity can be revealed in many ways. There are ways you may reveal the identity of your source without naming names. If your source requests anonymity, you must do your best to accommodate. We encourage linking to primary source material where possible, as this encourages a broader conversation with your audience about the topic at hand. (2) How should I cite source material? You should always cite sources for any material you are quoting, paraphrasing, or otherwise borrowing from someone else. The style you choose to use should follow from what is common in your blogging genre. If you are citing a source from the web, a link and proper attribution is in order. Depending on the genre in which you blog, more links may be expected. Many blog genres are social arenas, and bloggers are expected to situate their work, using contextual links, in reference to other information on the web. Be aware that some web masters may not want to be linked to you. Links are not simply a connection; they carry meaning depending on how you frame the link from your blog. The linkee may not appreciate your frame and may request that you remove the link. When using others’ images, video, or other creative content, a link may not be enough to properly cite the work. You may be violating copyrights. We recommend that you always cite your source material, and heed takedown requests you may receive. When looking for source material to include in your blog posts (e.g., images, video, audio, etc), look for hints about attribution requests by the original poster. The copyright owner may have posted a Creative Commons license agreement for you to use, or may indicate how s/he wants her or his work cited on the web. We also recommend that you use the many Creative Commons spaces online that act as open repositories for creative content for which authors allows varied use of material and give specific instructions for attribution. Responsibilities Like most authors, bloggers are most likely writing with some sort of audience in mind. Those readers may not agree with everything you have to say, but you have a responsibility to make what you say up-to-date, navigable, accessible and socially aware. As a blogger you are responsible to your audience, to your sponsors, to the institutions you blog for, and to the community you create with reader comments. (1) How often should I blog? Whether you blog frequently or infrequently depends on the kind of blog. Frequently updated blogs can build and maintain an audience more easily. However, that audience comes to rely on frequent updates, and can be easily disappointed if the post rate drops significantly. Infrequent blogging can make it hard to build a reliable audience in the early stages, but can give you the time you need to determine the character of your blog as you get started. The frequency with which you blog depends on the genre and the topic(s) you cover, the expectations of your audience in that field, and possibly the expectations of your sponsors or employers. Use category/tags/titles wisely to encourage readership. Blogs that cover several topics, or have many posts can be difficult to navigate. Readers may want to view only certain topic-related posts, or search for posts in an archive. Using categories and tags can help readers read more selectively or search through archives more effectively. We recommend creating a limited set of categories that make sense to you and to your readers. Depending on your genre, topic, and readership, categories may be predetermined, or may become clear to you after you have been blogging for a while.

(2) How do I make my blog accessible? Accessibility can mean several things ranging from browser compatibility to syndication to Section 508 compliance. It is best practice to check browser compatibility. Your blog may include special design elements that do not resolve properly in all browsers. Double check your design and indicate compatibility when necessary. Many blog readers read blogs through a central tool. Rather than navigating to a blog’s URL, the reader will pull newly updated content from your blog and others to display in an aggregator or feed reader. The reader pulls updates from the blog through a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. RSS standardizes blog content formats to deliver to a reader. RSS feeds can be formatted to contain all or some of the blog content, and can include ads. Since many readers of blogs use aggregators to skim many blogs in one location, it is best practice to enable them to access your content via their aggregator. Blogs should also be accessible to people with disabilities. If you blog for a federal agency in the U.S., receive federal funding for your blog, or are under contract with a federal agency your blog must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act – the Federal Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility and Compliance Act. Commercial blogs are encouraged to follow accessibility guidelines set by the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

(3) How do I protect the privacy rights of my readers? Bloggers should commit to protecting the privacy rights of their readers. If you collect personal information, specify the way it will be used. Indicate whether or not the information gathered will be shared with a third party including hosts, advertisers, and traffic trackers. TRUSTe provides a Model Privacy Disclosures document to help in crafting a privacy policy. Privacy policies are particularly important on any blog that enables interaction. If you enable comments on your blog, either through your host or via a third party comment tool, you should indicate to the reader what information is required to interact with the blog, and how that information will be reused (by whom).

(4) Do blog readers expect a level of courtesy in postings and comments? Blog readers do expect a level of courtesy in postings and comments. Your policy statement should include a description of common courtesies you’ll follow in posting, and that you expect readers to follow in comments. It is common to find a list of behaviors that are encouraged and discouraged. Bloggers often list the qualities of comments that are encouraged, those that are discouraged, and those that will be processed by a moderator. Moderators may use different techniques in dealing with comments that do not comply with the comment guidelines. Some blogs request encoding of spoilers to keep content hidden to those who may stumble upon it; some blogs add editor comments to reader comments in response to comment policies; some blogs delete contents entirely replacing the deleted post with a notice form the editor. Whatever technique you choose to handle comments, be clear about posting it so readers have access to the guidelines. Comment moderation guidelines should include statements regarding: 1. whether comments will be moderated at all; 2. the kind of comments that are encouraged; 3. the kind of comments that are discouraged; 3. how inappropriate comments will be handled; and 4. a link policy.

(5) What responsibility does the audience have to the blogging community? Blog readers are an active audience. They often expect to participate in comment discussions, but can often forget the leadership role they play as an active audience member. You may choose to exercise more or less control over the interactions between your audience members at your blog site. It is yourresponsibility to set the tone of interactivity in your blog space. You should commit to maintaining a convivial space on the web. Encourage respectful behavior. Outline what you consider to be disrespectful behavior in a comment policy statement. Include remedies for moderating comments, and be sure to follow the rules you outline in your own posts as well.

(6) How should I handle damaging statements made in my blog’s comments? Unless your blog is designed as a trolling blog (this activity is not recommended), you should commit to maintaining a convivial space on the web. You should encourage those who comment to respect each other, and not make damaging statements under your title. You may ennumerate to any degree the kinds of anti-social behavior that will not be tolerated on your blog. Remedies range from altering the inflammatory text to dilute it to deletion of posts to banning readers from commenting entirely. Damaging and anti-social comments include, but are not limited to: racist, sexist, and homophopic statements; advertisements; purposefully argumentative political commentary; self-promotion; and personally identifying information about yourself or others.

Face: Personal and professional blogs

The personality you display on your blog can be personal or professional. People blog for many reasons, and the distinctions of personal or professional are not mutually exclusive or tied to any one blogging genre. Personalization and Professionalism exists as a spectrum. Your blog may shift at times being more professional, and at times being more personal. Your affiliations and your audience will help you determine the face you present in your blog. If you are blogging as a representative of an organization, the face you present should fit with the face presented on the web by the organization itself. Consider the audience you will attract to your blog; consider their expectations. Regardless of your genre, you should consider whether you want your readers to see a personal or professional face when reading your blog.

(1) What constitutes a personal or professional take? They way you present different aspects of your blog will indicate to the reader your level of professionalism. The tone of your posts, your technical and design choices, and your stated and implied affiliations all add dimensions to your public face. The topics you choose to cover in your blog, and more importantly, the tone in which you write about them will influence the seriousness with which your readers read your blog. You may treat trivial topics seriously, or vice versa, but consider how that choice will impact the readers experience of your blog. Similarly, the design elements you choose for your blog indicate a level of savviness on the part of the blogger, and will influence how the reader reads your content. Choose design elements that do not interfere with the content of your posts if the content of your posts is the primary source of content on your blog. Additionally, where you choose to host your blog indicates a dimension of face to your readers. There is a diversity of commercial blog hosts such as WordPress.com and Blogger.com. With these free commercial hosting services, you may have less control over design, and may be required to use a host-specific domain name to point to your blog.

(2) How much information is too much information? Keep in mind that unless you technically limit access to your blog through password protection or blog within a closed community, everything you post is publicly available. Any information you post is publicly available, linkable, copyable, and stored somewhere. Digital data is easily transformed, and it is easy to lose control of the information you offer once it is publicly available. Information on the web is highly accessible and pliable. Do not disclose facts, stories, rumors, opinions, or creative content on your blog that you do not want public. If it is important to disclose this type of information, you can choose to include a disclaimer to warn the reader of what is coming or to explain to the reader limits on acceptable reuse of your content.

Text: Images, music, video, audio, and the protection of creative content online

No matter what kind of content you will include in your blog post a policy statement on attribution. Include a standard for how you will indicate attributions in your posts and how you expect readers to indicate attribution of cited material in comments. Also include a policy on reuse of your original content. Be aware that many blogging hosts offer widgets and tools for cross-pollinating data through your different sites in your web presence. These widgets and tools make aggregating and cross-posting creative content simple, but can easily violate copyright laws and the expectations of other people posting content to the web responsibly.

(1) How can I protect my own work, and how can I be sure I am not violating someone else's copyrights? Before you use someone else’s creative content, always be sure to check for somecopyright notification. You may be looking at a reuse or reposting of someone’s work, so you may have to do some web sleuthing to find the original author’s initial posting to determine whether your use of it is allowed. After you’ve determined that you can reuse someone else’s creative work, always attribute it with a name and a link if possible. To protect and share your own work, we recommend using Creative Commons licenses. With a Creative Commons license, you can use a simple icon and link to indicate what types of reuse you deem acceptable, and how to cite your authorship. There are many media commons (such as Wikimedia) available online where you can find creative works of all formats that authors indicate as reusable with a Creative Commons license.

(2) How should I handle photo-manipulation or photoshopped images? Before reposting an image, audio, video, or music file that you suspect has been tampered with, do some research to find evidence of the manipulation. Telling a story using manipulated images may distort the truth, and readers will call your intentions into question. If you post a creative work that has been manipulated in order to manipulate the truth or opinion of a story, you have a responsibility to inform your readers either before you post, or after you discover the manipulation. You should make a good faith effort to determine whether the file you are posting has been manipulated or not before your initial post. If your blog has a running theme of posting manipulated images as commentary, you should indicate to your readers that the content has been manipulated, and that the manipulation is part of your commentary. Manipulation in this sense indicates some sort of ill will, malice, or social engineering to tell your story. Manipulated creative content can also be a creative remix of previously existing creative work to make a new statement. If you are posting a remix, treat it as you would any other creative content, seek out permission to repost and standards for attributing authorship. When posting remixes, also include proper attribution and links to the original material used in the remix you are posting.

Truth For the purposes of this document, we assume that the blogs you are writing are meant to convey the truth as you experience it. Even anonymous or parody blogs are likely to maintain some sort of “true” authorial voice that remains relatively unchanging. However, what happens when events, new information, or personal experiences change what a blog author thinks about a particular topic? In this case, we encourage authors to be transparent and forthright about the changes they may make to already published postings.

(1) What do I do if new facts emerge, or there are corrections that need to be made to older posts? We encourage making corrections to postings if the truth changes. Deleting old postings is not recommended, unless there is a compelling reason to do so. It is best to strike-through facts that are no longer accurate and provide clear updates to the posting that indicate the changes that have been made since it was first published. We assume that as additional information emerges about a topic (especially when it involves current events), a blogger may have a new opinion on the topic. In this case, it might be best to create a new posting that links together individual posts about the topic, so that readers can see how the author’s perspective has been shaped over time. Again, we encourage a policy of transparency (see above), as this builds trust with both your audience and the larger communities of which you are a part.

Citizenship Part of what makes some blogs unique is their ability to serve as public forums (on a miniature scale) where individuals potentially engage in deliberative dialogue about social issues. This is especially true in journalistic-type blogs, although it’s possible that individual posts on even the most personal of blogs will deliberate over important issues of the day. This means that bloggers have the responsibility to be good public citizens and remain conscious of their ethical responsibilities to the larger communities of which they are a part. In particular, we encourage bloggers to consider the potential impact of that which they write – especially when writing about other public or private citizens. Increasingly, the lines between what is considered public and private information is blurring, making it important for bloggers to consider how their work will impact others.

(1) How do I know what privacy individuals about whom I write should be afforded? This is a difficult question, and it’s likely that each blogger will individually have to decide how they will handle disclosure of private information. In general, we encourage bloggers to be circumspect when evealing information about private citizens, who are generally afforded more privacy rights than public figures. As with many of the guidelines we’ve offered here, the genre and purpose of the blog will largely inform the blogger’s choices in revealing private information. Blogs focused on public figures may have widely different approaches to dealing with the revelation of private information about these individuals. For example, a celebrity gossip blog will likely reveal information of a personal nature that would be distasteful or potentially libelous if this sort of material was written about an ordinary private citizen. At the other end of the spectrum, there are times when even the most ethically minded journalistic blog might reveal private information about an individual if it serves a larger purpose of informing the public about important issues of the day. For more information about the differences between public and private figures, see the Citizen Media Law Project’s web site.

Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Bastiaan Vanacker and Don Wycliff for their thoughtful review of late drafts of this text. They both provided insights on ethical positioning and practical concerns. The authors would also like to thank Don Heider (Dean, School of Communication, Loyola University Chicago) for convening and participating in the Best Practices Working Group comprised of CDEP affiliated faculty in the School of Communication. An initial meeting of the Working Group generated early ideas for the direction of the text.

Appendix – Exemplars This is a list of blogs and other links we think are especially effective in their approach to the above ethical issues. We have arranged them by genre. Excellent “About” page/disclosure statement Kottke.org/about (professional blogger) Alex Halavais, About (academic blogger) Code of Ethics Society of Professional Journalists Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) References Sullivan, A. (2008). “Why I blog.” The Atlantic. Retrieved online April 25, 2010 at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/why-i-blog/7060/ Walker Rettberg, J. (2008). Blogging. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.

Blogging, Quotes, and Sources

If there is one thing that should matter to reporters – online or elsewhere – it is the sacredness of the quote.

The quotation marks and what falls between them are the blood and guts of any article. They set the tone of the story and give life to what could otherwise be a plain statement of facts. A good quote means you found the right source, you know how to ask the right questions and you are a competent note-taker. And it’s no exaggeration to say where quotes are placed and how they move the narrative along can be the difference between the Pulitzer Prize and what lines the bottom of a bird cage.

How you use quotes in a modern context also determines something else – whether you are a hack or a professional. Because in this new age of texts, blogs, chat rooms, Facebook walls and everything else in between, there needs to be guidelines as to how people’s words are found, shared and conveyed within the written word, virtual or not.

The questions for today’s reporter are many. If you write for a blog, how do you know what is appropriate to use and what shouldn’t be mentioned? If you write for a newspaper, do you have to tell the reader that your quotes are from an email and not through a face-to-face conversation? Can you use a quote from a chat room without someone's permission?

The answers, once clear and definite, are now clouded by gray areas that bear discussion. With so many new places to write – and so many new writers – there needs to be a new conversation about how we talk to sources, how we write what these sources say and whether quotations still carry the weight they once did, given how first-person posts are considered newsworthy and relevant.

Is blogging or writing for online news sources less serious or less requiring ethical standards than traditional reporting? The apparent answer is a resounding, “No.” But a variety of news-gathering experts agree that there needs to be more disclosure of how quotes are gained, where the conversation took place and whether the source agrees that the statement was communicated to the reader correctly. And the digital world actually gives reporters more leeway to fix mistakes and make the record of someone’s statements correct if there was an error when first published.

Reporters are taught from their first newspaper class in high school that quotes spice up a story. In an ideal world, you meet with a source in person and have an in-depth conversation about the topic. Wide-ranging questions are asked and answered honestly and thoroughly. The conversation is taken down in notes or recorded. Those words are then translated, edited and included in the story. Boom – you have journalism in a nutshell.

The rules really haven’t changed. But these days, people are emailing their questions in advance and using written answers in their stories. A reporter might text a source during a deadline or on a breaking story to have their comment faster than the competition. A chat room for ex-employees might glean new insights or conversations that a reporter might otherwise not be privy to in traditional reporting. All these are fair ways to gain information.

Bonnie Caprara, a Metro Detroit freelance writer who works for daily newspapers and online blogs told me via a chat session that she once did the rounds at cop shops and the like. Now, she follows her sources on Twitter and Facebook. She uses their comments there as launching points for stories – but she feels the ethical thing to do is follow up with an email to set up interviews for her articles. Some reporters, however, take those comments straight from Facebook without informing the reader where they came from.

As Caprara argues, that reporter should disclose where they gained the quotes and why. I’ve noticed that many newspapers and blogs are starting to do this. For example, a reporter might note that they talked to a source on the phone You see this particularly in exchanges between an entertainment writer and a Hollywood-based celebrity. It seems fair that all reporters do the same, especially when the conversation takes place on a telephone texting exchange, where information might come fast and furious (and misspelled or auto-corrected, but that’s a problem for another time).

Meeting in person also gives a story one more bonus, points out Paul Bradshaw, publisher of the Online Journalism Blog and founder of Help Me Investigate. He also is co-author of “The Online Journalism Handbook: Skills to Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age” and leads the MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University and is Visiting Professor at City University.

“As always I think there are subtleties here that are often missed: in-person interviews are generally better because you get more color (if you're a good writer) and the interviewee has less time to prepare their answer,” Bradshaw told me during an email exchange on Facebook. “I think it's often too easy for a journalism student to hide behind email and easily copy and paste the Q&A format into a piece.”

While there is space within journalism for experts to write first-person or original blog posts, Bradshaw does believe in traditional standards when it comes to good journalism.

“I do, however, every year urge students not to rely on email for interviews, but instead to use it as a last resort (it's too easily ignored or put off). In fact, this year, I had one session where the students had two hours to get a story and were not allowed to use email!” he wrote.

On the other hand, some bloggers may find their editors do not require quotes at all. These exchanges between the reader and writer are more intimate in a way; you know all of the information is coming from what is presumably an expert in their field. One such writer is Melissa Preddy, who does a daily blog for the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, a part of the Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism in Phoenix.

“I have relaxed my standards about email interviews a bit – haven't really done any but I would if need be due to time constraints – and I think it is good to say ‘wrote in an email,’” Preddy told me via an email exchange between us.

She does have issue with bloggers that fail to do what insiders call primary-source reporting. That’s where a reporter gains the information on their own rather than through other reporters, sources or materials.

“It seems certain ‘factoids’ get picked up and repeated, rinse and repeat so many times, that they become gospel and no one bothers to check them out. Like ‘agriculture is Michigan's second-largest industry’ (it's not) or ‘it's cheaper to buy fast food than fruits and vegetables.’ (NYT just did a piece attempting to debunk that.) I think many bloggers rely too much on links and the written word of others,” Preddy wrote.

This essay did lead me to talk to one source on the phone – that was Jack Lessenberry, a full-time member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University. He also is WUOM-FM's senior political analyst as well as a writer for many national and regional publications, including Vanity Fair, Esquire, George, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. (I would have talked to him in person because he does live and work by me; but the poor man’s schedule has him too busy to chat…our phone conversation took place in part as he navigated a parking garage.)

What are quotation ethics for today’s digital journalist? Lessenberry made his thoughts plain: “They are no different than those for print, broadcast, radio or television journalists. You don’t steal stuff. You don’t plagiarize. You find the facts and you report them.”

Reporters have one primary job, Lessenberry added. That is to make the significant interesting, and a lot of the interest takes place between quotation marks. No typical Joe on the Street understands the national debt. But if he reads great articles about it in the Wall Street Journal, chances are he walks away better informed that he previous was. And he might have enjoyed the education in the process.

“If democracy is going to work, we need an informed citizenry,” and good journalistic ethics are an important part of that, Lessenberry said.

Sloppier reporting is so much easier to find in the digital age, Lessenberry said. There are more ethical breaches because there are more people (trained and untrained) writing. Having a journalism degree isn’t necessary to have a blog that people follow religiously. You don’t need to have aced your ethics class to get a gig on the Huffington Post. All you have to do is have a few fired up rants on the latest celebrity scandal and you’re an overnight sensation in the reporting world. Or, at least, you have a blog that can be monetized for personal gain. And when you blog to get attention or write to get ads on your site, you’re probably not going to be that concerned about whether what you write is true or right or even has two or more sources.

“We have an obligation (as journalists) to be fair and responsible,” Lessenberry said. “You’ve got to filter out the significant from the trivial. … If aliens came to Earth, they would think we’re all homicidal sex perverts who steal money. Everything is about Jennifer Aniston or the Kardashians. It’s easier and sexier to write about the latest blond woman lost in Aruba than the debate over affordable education. And the missing blond has no impact on my life or the lives of my children.”

The other side of the coin for digital reporting is that everything is under the microscope. If you do make a mistake, then it’s there for the public’s massive consumption. “Everybody hears it, everybody sees it and everybody reads it,” Lessenberry said. “Everything is recorded. … I’m convinced that what happened to Don Imus would have been forgotten if it had happened before everything was recorded and replayed over and over again.”

Good quotes, as is true for good ethics, take time to develop. If you’ve been counting, you’ll notice I talked to pretty much everyone for this essay via phone, chat room, email or Facebook. And that’s how I’ve written for the past six years as a freelance writer. Perhaps this is the way I’ll continue to do it. But I do appreciate the difference between in person conversations and those that that place in other ways. What I do – and how I write it – does indeed matter to me as a writer and to the reader. And that can never get lost in translation.

Corrections and Online News

I recently was on the receiving end of a rather humorous correction to one of my articles when it appeared online. An Op/Ed feature I wrote for the Chicago Tribune went through copy edit, and the word "their" was changed to "tits" when they actually meant to change it to "its." I laughed when I saw the silly mistake, sent an email to my editor about it and the change was quickly made. No muss, no fuss.

Changes and corrections in the world of journalism are not always so funny, though. Newspapers don't like to make them, but most do so diligently. Print and digital are very different in this regard, though. If a change is made to an article that originally appears online and did not come from the print edition, if that change is not called out prominently then the reader assumes the mistake or error never occurred in the first place.

That dynamic got me thinking about how journalism corrections are handled in the digital age, and so I investigated how some major news sites handle the process.

The New York Times’ site may have the gold standard for dealing with this issue. The term “Corrections” is clearly called out in the home page navigation, and when you click on the link you go to a simple, well-organized page that lists corrections two ways. At the top of the page there are links to corrections that occurred on recent dates, and beneath that are links to articles that have been recently amended.

When you click on a date, you see a list of the changes and a concise explanation of why they were made. On the day I looked, they ranged from correcting a quote made by presidential candidate Mitt Romney to re-indentifying a hockey player in a photo caption. When you click on the link to the article in which the mistake occurred, that page also contains the correction, noted prominently at the bottom of the story. The only real issue with how the Times handles this is that it can be a bit difficult to tell if the article is from the newspaper or was original to their site.

On their corrections index page, the Times also encourages its readers to contact them about errors they may see, and they list an email address and a phone number to use to send them in. And then the Times does something really interesting – they go a step further in the process of assuring their readers that their concerns will be taken seriously. The Times gives another avenue if someone is unhappy with the response they receive about an error: “Readers dissatisfied with a response or concerned about the paper’s journalistic integrity may reach the public editor at public@nytimes.com or (212) 556-7652.” The Times is anything but perfect, however their commitment to accuracy in this regard is both commendable and fairly water tight.

How does CNN’s website, which gets substantially more traffic than the Times, handle corrections? Unlike the Times, there is no link on the site’s home page to a section that aggregates corrections. I then used the site’s search engine to look for a “corrections” section, but the results only took me to articles in which the term is used as part of the story.

I then resorted to doing a Google search for “corrections on CNN.com.” That generated a link to an index page of corrections on CNN Money’s site, but not one for CNN. CNN Money’s page was similar to that of the Times – a chronological list of corrections with links to the articles, with the corrections notice also repeated at the end of the article.  The URL for the CNN Money corrections page is http://money.cnn.com/news/corrections/.

So, would the elusive CNN corrections page exist at http://cnn.com/news/corrections/? That link actually leads to the dreaded “Page not found” page. OK, well what about just http://www.cnn.com/corrections/? Again, no luck.

I am not the only one who has been frustrated with CNN’s way of handling corrections online. In Dec. 2010, PBS.org ran an article on their Idea Lab blog about the process of contacting CNN to ask them to correct a mistake in a video report in which the prime minister of New Zealand was misidentified. More than a month after sending in a report about the error, CNN had still not responded. Frustrated, the blog author wrote, “for all we know, the network may have already issued a correction on the air weeks ago. The problem is, there's no way to find out on its website because CNN.com has no corrections content at all.” (CNN eventually did make the correction, but it was almost 6 weeks after the fact.)

But what about across the pond? Do papers in other countries handle the process any differently? I surfed across the sea to check out The Guardian’s site, which attracts more than 4 million users a month. There is a prominent “Corrections” link on the home page that links to a detailed section devoted to “Corrections and clarifications” that is organized chronologically, much like the Times. Accuracy, it seems, is a priority at The Guardian as well.

The three preceding examples are all from news organizations with reputations for liberal/progressive points of view. What about a news organization that emphatically leans right?

There is no link on the home page of Fox News’ site to any sections dealing with corrections. A search of the site for “corrections” results in the same thing I found at CNN – a list of articles that include the word. Could Google get me there?

The top result for searching “corrections on Fox News” was a link to the “Fox New Corrections” Twitter feed. However, this was not run by Fox, and its last Tweet was in 2009. Could it be that Fox News has yet to make a mistake? Given the network’s rather high opinion of itself, it’s a safe bet that some people there may think so.

All kidding aside, though, what does this survey say about correcting journalism mistakes in the digital age? First, because of the massive amount of information being generated, it’s a difficult, time-intensive process that requires the audience to be actively involved. And second, if a site does not do it well, it not only will alienate and frustrate its audience, but also it will eventually be a credibility killer.

Death & Sports Writing in the Digital Age

A girl died in southeastern Pennsylvania. A mere 16 years of age, she was driving a 2004 Honda Civic on Bethel Church Road. She lost control of the vehicle, skittering across the median into the southbound lane before striking a tree, slamming metal and plastic and bark and bone. Rescued from the crash, she was driven to the hospital, where she would pass away shortly after the accident.

The typical types of descriptors were bandied about; bright, music loving and much missed by family and friends. A varsity soccer player at one of the high schools on my beat, her team was to take the field for the first time without her on my assignment. Purple headbands and wristbands were there--purple had been her favorite color--and the emotion was palpable. I made the requisite mention of her in the piece, then moved on to the game. The local paper's coverage was different.

Buried in a long piece was the score, the actual acts of her teammates as they attempted to move on; instead was a focus on the loss, the grief, the quotes that get stay-at-home-mom's eyes to water as they read the paper to see what was said about their child. Nearly a thousand words on her loss, what she meant to her teammates, the purple memorials and endless harping on a tragedy that was being put behind by a game, a return to life. It took seven paragraphs for the score to even be mentioned, and there were at least two articles about the team's moving on alone.

My piece made mention of the girl for the introduction, a nod to the remembrance, then moved on to the action. Her name was not in the original headline, as I made a concerted effort to make the story what it was: a piece of simple sports writing. As I do not doubt the sometimes transcendental power of sport, I wished to turn my spotlight on to the game, the very healing act that the girls themselves were participating in. The point was not who was missing; the point was that the young women on the field were still there, still standing and living and wanting to heal. I asked nothing about the deceased in my interview with the coach, the girl's mention in the quotes came organically. The picking and prying questions--digging into the freshest of graves--reeked of cheap journalism, of a desire to make something moving at the expense of telling the true story.

The resulting piece was simple sports writing, a slim 646 words a lean retelling of a lopsided, emotional game. But the headline was re-worked, to "In Memory of ****** ******", the exact kind of overbearing sentiment I wished to avoid. It was perhaps unavoidable, and demur in comparison to the glut of coverage the local daily would milk from the tragedy, but it cut me none the less.

The girl had become a hook, a mere thread to help me tell the tale of a blowout soccer game in a small exurb of Philadelphia that no one outside of the town would ever care about. I did not want her to be the focus, but I used her as the focus, for my own needs and for the sake of the story. But as deplorable as the act was, I found some semblance of solace in my attempt to focus on life. To tell the tale of the girls who were bravely facing their teammate's loss, so that their healing process would be forever documented not just more morbid ink-wringing blood articles about a girl who died too soon. She was a hook, but an organic one.

In the current journalism-under-siege atmosphere that seems prevalent amongst media types, few journalists are so perplexingly placed to both suffer immensely and weather the storm like sportswriters. In theory, the ready availability of sports scores renders the sportswriter useless; the fan need not dig any deeper to fulfill their ultimate desire, finding out whether their team won or lost that day. Where the sportswriter fights back and gains ground on their more hard news oriented peers, is in the freedoms they enjoy on the sports page.

In the sports section, the sportswriter is granted latitude a city side or municipal reporter could only dream of, enough to make even entertainment and political writers jealous. Healthy sprinklings of obscure verbs and literary flourishes are not only more common in the sports pages, they should be encouraged by editors and publishers, because it is the sportswriter's ability to vividly bring a game back to life, and to accent it with the ever important hook, that makes them an irreplaceable vanguard in the battle to keep true journalism relevant.

But that position also leaves sportswriters at the mercy of the hooks they find to hang their stories on, for better or for worse. Take Chicago Tribune Cubs reporter Paul Sullivan. Rather than the typical game recap, Sullivan's stories often use the games as framing devices for larger parts of the Cub's narrative; who might be getting traded, how player development is coming along, dugout drama and other, insider-only perspectives are spelled out with the games as the backdrop. Indeed, aside from the score along the top of his pieces, one may be forgiven for assuming they were news pieces, not game coverages. Which, in many cases, they may well be. He turns the daily grind of a 162 game season--and let us face it, more often than not it is a brutal grind indeed for the north siders--and instead creates a journal of vignettes backed up by the experience, accuracy and access only a professional journalist can be in a position to supply.

Sullivan is a fine example of a sportswriter finding, and utilizing, well chosen hooks to maintain relevance in a world where the nuts and bolts are easily ascertained. More journalists and editors would be keen to follow his example; anyone can regurgitate scores, but only professional journalists can provide well written, interesting pieces, and there will always be a market for talented writers. Unfortunately, this new direction's dependence on juice and drama to enliven articles lives and dies by the quality of the narratives it finds. And when that drama is the untimely death of a young woman, it feels far more like dying.

Naturally, the tragic accident involving the young soccer player could not have gone unreported. It was news, cut and dry, especially with her being an athlete in an area where high school sports carries great weight, and no apologies should be made for pieces like the reports on the accident, the death and the team's handling of it. But to glean more starts to tread a delicate line, between reporting news and creating news. A dramatic narrative is a necessary evil, particularly in sporting events where the outcome and the action on the field cannot serve the purpose. But when does the ceaseless mentioning of a fallen teammate push beyond pragmatic and into tasteless?

The answer to this question is the same as it is for any vice or crutch: moderation. After the initial reporting and covering any legitimate advances in the story, references to the deceased should be relegated to organic occurrences, like unprompted references in quotes, anniversary pieces or a thoughtful, thorough feature (more than one veers dangerously close to the exploitive).

We write too much of the dead, and the dawning of digital content and the 24-hour news cycle only serves to exacerbate the issue. Obituaries, epitaphs, reactions, memorials and the constant check ins besieged not only the soccer players and family but the community as well. Videos were recorded. She was mentioned in boys soccer articles, in articles on kids visiting the tree her vehicle struck, in articles about the new teen driving legislation. It seemed odd to spend so much time on a girl who was gone, and to not instead be telling the stories of those struggling to pick up the pieces and move on, pieces the local media were deliberately shattering on the ground so they could gleefully report back of their assembly. We should not forget or ignore a death. We simply should not chronicle the departed at the expense of the living. That is a job for historians and scholars.

Digital Bodies

Have you ever wished you could instantly change your body shape, height, skin color or even gender? On the popular virtual world Second Life, wishful thinking becomes virtual reality. The Second Life Marketplace features a massive assortment of shapes, skins, eyes and other body components, from the “Luscious Lanae” shape to “Irresistible Looking Eyelashes” to “Afro Male Ethnic Skin,” all for purchase to create your avatar.

Second Life promotes these choices as a form of self-expression, a chance to “dress up and design a new 3D you.” At first glance, these choices seems to epitomize Princeton English professor Mark Hansen’s 2004 description of an online world that “affords an unprecedented freedom to the digital author who is therewith able to invent herself subject only to the constraints of the on-line medium.” It is a world where users can transcend the limitations of race, gender, class and age which attach themselves to our bodily existence. Users are free to create new identities and perhaps even new forms of community.

Hansen was, however, imagining a text-based digital community, not the dazzling world of YouTube clips, video chatting, Facebook and Second Life, which form the bulk of today’s digital interactions. As these modes make abundantly clear, bodies are very much present online. The new possibilities for bodily re-presentation and even re-creation stir up a haze of ethical dilemmas, but one thing is clear: digital bodies are vitally important.

Elaine Scarry, author of The Body in Pain, has remarked that our bodies are the medium through which we engage with and understand ourselves in the world. Since the Internet and other digital media profoundly restructure how we understand bodily experience, a closer look at our digital bodies can shed new light on emerging understandings of self and society.

What possibilities are there for re-presenting and re-creating our bodies in digital form? What Faustian bargains (recall the legend of Johann Faust who traded his soul with the devil in exchange for power and knowledge) do we unwittingly make as we digitize and upload our bodies?

Opportunities for Bodily Re-Presentation and Re-Creation

Second Life is an extreme example of the detachment from physical reality that digital technologies offer. Your avatar and virtual neighborhood do not need to have any resemblance to real life. On the other end of the spectrum, live video-chatting is perhaps the closest we have gotten to simulating actual physical presence. Even then, you can choose to show only part of yourself. In between the poles lies a spectrum of digital bodies with more or less congruence to real life, from selectively chosen LinkedIn profile photos, to edited video and sound clips, to snapshots from 10 years ago that “pass” for our online presence today.

There is also pure text which, while a narrow medium, can still be used to constitute digital bodies. Rodney Jones, for example, studied how users of online gay chat rooms moved from text-based chats to multi-modal forms of communication. Users began interaction by writing their bodies into digital existence, giving statistics such as “22, 173 cm, 136 lbs” or using descriptors such as “stocky fit tanned smooth.” Users relied on their encounters with text-based digital bodies to determine whether to transition into image-based interactions.

What remains consistent across all these digital media is the greater control users have in how they represent their bodies. Sociologist Erving Goffman observed that social interactions involve information that is “given” – intentional – and “given off” – unintentional. Because information channels are fewer and narrower online than in face-to-face interaction, users can focus their attention on carefully controlling what gets sent through these channels. We upload the most flattering pictures of ourselves to Facebook and carefully tailor self-descriptions on profile pages, for example.

But even as aspects of digital media allow users more leeway to control what is “given” about our bodies, these same functions also set the stage for the viral spread of information that we did not intend, exponentially widening the scope of what could be “given off.” Former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s “sexting scandal” is a sobering example of “sharing” functions gone awry. Even though Weiner intentionally shared with several women over Twitter and Facebook the images which led to his downfall, the multiplying effect of social media broadcast his digital body to a much larger audience than he intended.

In other cases, we don’t even generate our own digital bodies. It’s been popular lately among my friends to post funny and rather embarrassing photos from high school on Facebook. These images of me posing as a Charlie’s Angel or baring my teeth for a frightening smile make their rounds long before I have a chance to distance myself from a digital body that was not my choice to upload by removing the tag or asking the photo to be taken down.

Ironically, even as digital technologies give us more control of how our bodies come across, in some ways we are left with less control, less privacy and less authorship than we anticipated.

Digital Bodies Give

As with any Faustian bargain, the opportunities for bodily re-presentation and re-creation are a give and take. The freedom to selectively represent our bodies and in some cases completely bypass any grounding in physical reality can sometimes be harmful. In other cases, it can be beneficial.

Anthropologist Denise Carter documents that many inhabitants of the virtual world “Cybercity” (a pseudonym) celebrated the absence of physical bodies, describing their online relationships as more pure and intimate than those in real life. One user remarked, “Just being online eliminates the physical entanglement that comes with having the extra physical side to deal with . . . we want to be with each other for who we are not what we look like.” For this user and others like her, digital technology provides an opportunity to be more authentic and true to oneself.

If physical bodies put individuals at some disadvantage (namely, being discriminated based on race, sex, age, or appearance), the absence of bodies in the digital realm might be a boon not just for building friendships, but also for other online interactions, such as job searching, making business deals or dating.

Escaping the constraints of physical appearance along with all the snap judgments that go along with them could also benefit society at large. If we could encounter each other outside of the stereotypical categories such as “woman,” “Black” or “teenager,” in which our physical bodies are immediately slotted, perhaps social barriers could be bridged and new solutions to pressing social issues could emerge.

Digital Bodies Take Away

While some social progress may be happening online, in many cases stereotypes are simply being reinforced. Many of today’s digital interactions start with images, not with text. On dating websites, a quick glance at a photo determines whether a match-seeker will pursue further interaction. On the professional network LinkedIn, uploading a profile photo is crucial to establishing credibility, but at the same time makes a job seeker vulnerable to discrimination based on their race, gender, age, or appearance.

In a digital sphere where image is indeed everything, substantial content that engages both the mind and heart takes the back seat to visual displays which impress the eyes. When this is the case, our digital bodies might lead not to deeper connection with other people, but to disconnection from and exploitation of them.

Pornography and online sexual predation are extreme examples of how the distance between physical and virtual reality creates dangerous gaps into which many vulnerable people fall. Because of the computer-mediated distance and anonymity, people don’t have to behave the same way they do online as offline.

Whereas in a face-to-face encounter, you see another person’s body at the same time as you are seen, online interactions often lack that reciprocal quality. You can be seen without seeing back, and you can see other bodies, sometimes intimately, without being seen. This leaves many feeling exposed and vulnerable. Georg Simmel’s insight that, “The eye has a uniquely sociological function. The union and interaction of individuals is based upon mutual glances” doesn’t apply in a digital world where glances often lack a response.

In these one-way glances, the social fabric deteriorates. While being more “connected” through digital pathways, we can experience greater distance from each other. Furthermore, as we create digital bodies which are incongruent with our physical selves or act online in ways that we would never act in our physical bodies, we also experience internal disconnection, a fragmentation of the self.

Digital Bodies as a Reflection of Self and Society

So was the Faustian bargain worth it? Have we gained more than we lost? Perhaps it is still too early to tell. A few things can be noted, however, regarding how our digital bodies are reshaping our understandings of self and society.

Digital bodies lead to a greater tolerance for plurality. As we are exposed to more images and have greater capacity to re-present and re-create our digital bodies (as well as our physical bodies), we depart from an understanding that our physical bodies are the singular base upon which our selves are built. We get used to the fact that our bodies and our selves can be tweaked, upgraded and re-made in multiple forms.

The flip side of plurality, however, is duality. If we know that our digital bodies do not always correspond to our physical bodies, which one do we trust? Are we being manipulated, deceived, scammed? “Is this what they really look like, or was this photo taken 15 years earlier and 15 pounds lighter?” becomes a common question. As bases for truth fluctuate, social trust suffers as a result.

Perhaps, though, as earlier bases for discerning authenticity become untenable, we simultaneously develop more sophisticated mechanisms for testing sincerity and authenticity online. Rodney Jones (who researched online gay chat rooms), for example, reports that his informants used clues such as conversational style and even English proficiency to assess their chat partners.

As technology gives us a greater sense of control over the presentation and creation of our digital bodies, this also leads to less tolerance for limitations. If we can recreate our bodies online and leave behind that which lacks visual appeal, why would we be satisfied with our physical bodies (or our physical lives), which are so often messy, unseemly and uncooperative?

Theology professor Beth Felker Jones discusses this repercussion in her article on Pinterest and porn. The Pinterest images of gorgeous bodies (that no one in our everyday circles possesses) and picture-perfect meals (made with ingredients not found in any ordinary kitchen) function much like porn, which “may threaten my enjoyment of and attention to real life,” Felker writes.

Furthermore, being able to so easily alter online what we are not satisfied with in real life can actually stifle creativity rather than foster it. If we can create alternative bodies and alternative worlds instead of working with what we have, we may flee into the realm of fantasy instead of appreciating and creatively making do with what we have been given. This is detrimental not only to our ability to solve real-world problems, but also to our ability to be grateful and content with our limits. As essayist Wendell Berry so eloquently expresses in his poem “The Real Work,” “The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

Electronic Medical Records & Patient Confidentiality

A patient’s medical information is one of the most sensitive and private forms of data. And in the wrong hands, these records can have detrimental effects. Digital technology facilitates the dissemination of information at lightning-fast speeds which, in many instances, is a praiseworthy feat. However, the unauthorized access and distribution of electronic health records is a major ethical—and sometimes, legal—issue confronting medical professionals.

Since the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) began publicly disclosing health data breach information, a total of 20,970,222 individuals have been subject to large medical data breaches. (Note: the HHS requires organizations to report security breaches that involve unencrypted information that affects 500 or more people.)

Of the breaches reported to the HHS’ Office of Civil Rights, 52 percent of them involved theft, 20 percent involved unauthorized data access, and 11 percent involved data loss. In addition, 6 percent involved hacking, and 4 percent were classified as “other” or “unknown.”

Some of the more recent security breaches include the following:

- In December 2011, attorneys filed a class action lawsuit against the University of California Los Angeles Health System. The lawsuit stems from the theft of an external hard drive from the home of a faculty doctor. The hard drive contained the patient information - including names, birth dates, addresses and health data - of over 16,000 individuals. The information on the hard drive was encrypted, but the printed password needed to decode the data was also stolen.

- In June 2012, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center reported that an unencrypted laptop was stolen from the home of one of the organization’s physicians. The laptop contained the names, Social Security numbers, and treatment and research data of 30,000 patients.

- In June 2012, the Alaska Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) agreed to pay $1.7 million to settle violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. A portable electronic device that contained the Medicaid information of an unspecified number of Medicaid beneficiaries was stolen from the car of a DHHS computer technician.

- In July 2012, Hartford Hospital of Connecticut reported that an unencrypted laptop was stolen from the home of a hospital vendor employee. The laptop contained the personal information – including names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers, diagnoses and treatment info – of almost 10,000 patients.

While these incidents are unsettling, a 2011 security survey conducted by the Health Information and Management Systems Society may prove to be more startling. Of the 329 information technology and security respondents who work in hospitals and outpatient care centers, 53 percent stated that their organization spends less than 3 percent of their information technology budget on security.

Additionally, 82 percent of respondents said their organization shares electronic patient data with external organizations, and almost 25 percent said their organization does not perform security risk assessments.

This seemingly lax approach to protecting patient data may explain the results of the Ponemon Institute’s report, which reveals that medical data breaches have increased by 32 percent since 2010. The report surveyed 300 health care organization officials regarding their security measures for protecting electronic data. Eighty percent of respondents indicated that their organization uses mobile devices that contain patient data, but 50 percent admitted that their data is not protected.

If this information isn’t disconcerting enough, 73 percent of respondents in the survey said their organization does not have the resources to prevent unauthorized access to patient data, and 55 percent don’t think their organization could even detect all of the breaches that could occur.

While it would appear that some in the medical profession either don’t completely understand or care about the implications of breached medical records, those on the wrong side of the law certainly seem to comprehend and appreciate the value of patient medical data.

According to a panel of cyber security experts at the 2011 Digital Health Conference, medical identity theft has become one of the most lucrative forms of identify theft. Electronic health records can be sold for up to $50, which makes them more desirable than Social Security numbers—which garner $3—and credit card information—which is usually sold for $1.50. And, unlike credit cards, which can be cancelled, a patient’s medical information cannot be changed to stop criminal activity.

Thieves use electronic medical records, as well as health insurance and other personal information, to file false insurance claims, obtain prescriptions and even receive medical treatment.

The Federal Trade Commission states that the victims of medical identity theft are billed for this criminal activity and may experience a decrease in their credit score if they refuse to pay the bills. Additionally, the victims may lose their health care coverage as a result of the false claims filed by scammers.

However, theft is not the only form of security breaches. Sometimes, patient records are compromised in other ways. For example:

- A 2009 ABC News report found that 13 percent of medical schools admitted that their students posted confidential patient information on blogs or social networking sites. The students didn’t divulge the names of the patients, but they disclosed enough other personal information for the patients and their family members to recognize the subjects being discussed.

- According to a September 2010 article in the Huffington Post, New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center accidentally disclosed the information – including Social Security numbers – of 6,800 patients on the Internet.

- In September 2011, the New York Times reported that the names and diagnosis codes of 20,000 emergency room patients at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California were posted on a commercial website for almost a year before the breach was discovered by a patient and reported to the hospital. A vendor’s subcontractor who handled billing for the hospital caused the breach.

- In a February 2012 Orange County Register article, St. Joseph’s Medical Center in California acknowledged that the personal medical information of over 21,000 patients was available online for nearly a year. While the information did not contain Social Security numbers or addresses, it did include patient names, diagnoses, lab results and demographic information.

These examples of security breaches are just a few high-profile incidents that have garnered media attention. However, the problem is widespread and far-reaching. According to Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, “This is happening everywhere. We're beginning to see the consequences of a lack of adequate enforcement and a lack of significant effort to establish meaningful safeguards."

So, what are the ethical implications of this widespread, lax approach to patient confidentiality? Given the staggering number of breaches that occur annually and the long-term repercussions of these actions to victimized patients, is “Oops, we’re sorry,” an acceptable response?

And what about the paltry – and sometimes nonexistent - amount that most health care institutions budget to secure their electronic health data? Is there an ethical obligation to invest in safeguards for medical records? The sheer carelessness and negligence that lead to most of the reported security breaches seem to imply a callous disregard for patient confidentiality.

While the immediate results of inadequate safeguards manifest as public exposure and/or medical identity theft, these may not be the only consequences. This questionable behavior may also produce a deleterious ripple effect. First, people may doubt that their personal data will remain private. As a result, they may limit the information that they share with their medical providers, and without a complete patient composite, it would be difficult to provide effective medical care. And in a worst cast scenario, some people may elect to avoid medical treatment altogether.

So what can health care providers and medical institutions do to ensure that patients never have to choose between medical care and personal privacy? How can they stop these insidious breaches and demonstrate a sincere concern for patient confidentiality? Laurinda Harman, Cathy Flite, and Kesa Bond, in an article for the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, recommend much tighter security measures.

The first step in this process is to evaluate employees and vendors who have access to electronic medical records and determine what level of access is actually needed by each person. In addition, biometric scans of the face, eye, or finger can be used to verify a user’s identity before allowing access.

To prevent data hacking, passwords should be changed often – and never repeated; firewalls, antivirus software, and intrusion detection software should also be implemented in the fight against cyber criminals. In addition, since mobile devices are easily lost or stolen, the trio of authors advocates encrypting confidential data. Medical institutions also need a dedicated security officer and a team of health information technology experts who can assess and address security threats. However, the development and implementation of an effective health data security plan won’t be cheap, quick, or easy. It will be time- and labor-intensive, it will cost a pretty penny, and it may be cumbersome to the users and administrators. However, the alternative – which is to continue in the role of a sideline spectator - is not an acceptable option.

And while acknowledging that many medical institutions may be understaffed, underfunded and overworked, this does not absolve them of the ethical responsibility to ensure that the personal information of their patients is protected at all costs. “First do no harm” is not limited to medical care: the Hippocratic oath also extends to patient confidentiality. 

The End of Privacy in the Digital Age

Information on the Internet is subject to the same rules and regulations as conversation at a bar.

George Lundberg

The birth of the digital age has given rise to unprecedented levels of information and communication at unparalleled speeds of access. According to Lee Odden, author of Optimize, Google processes over 11 billion queries a month, Twitter handles over 350 billion tweets a day and almost a billion people are on Facebook. With communication and information flowing like water from a fire hydrant, the rights and privacy of digital consumers may be swept out to sea by ethically challenged individuals and companies.

A cautionary spin on a popular phrase, “What Happens in Vegas Stays on Facebook,” has been a career-ending wake-up call to politicians, teachers, coaches and other professionals who discovered that privacy settings are rendered null and void by “friends” who choose to share questionable pictures and videos. These same friends can also wreak havoc by retweeting controversial Twitter comments or forwarding thoughtless email remarks.

A central ethical issue involves the rights of individuals to take personal information that they receive as a member of someone’s “inner circle” and share it with the knowledge that it may cause embarrassment (or worse) for the subject in question.

Some friends may not have a malicious intent when they distribute unauthorized content. They merely find the material funny and want to share it with others in the same way that someone shares a good joke. These individuals may merely be thoughtless and are not considering the repercussions of exposing the content to a larger audience. On the other hand, for some people, it takes a painful, public, social media epiphany to reveal a Judas in the inner circle.

It is harder to process the motives of strangers who receive and forward personal information. Since they have no relationship with the subject, their anonymity may dull their ethical senses.

In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Frederick Lane, an attorney and the author of American Privacy, notes that in most cases, individuals are not losing control. They are giving control away. Lane laments the fact that “we trade information that our parents and grandparents would have considered private for fun, for convenience, for that kind of thing.”

Unfortunately, refraining from posting embarrassing information does not guarantee privacy. The camera found on most cell phones allows individuals to be videotaped without their permission, and footage can be viral in a matter of seconds. The risk of unauthorized photos has been a problem – especially for celebrities – since the formation of the Eastman Kodak Company. Now, the stakes are higher, the potential for damage is greater and the tools of the trade are much smaller. Cell and smart phone cameras are tiny and inconspicuous, and include zoom lenses and autofocus features. Some have video editing capabilities, which increase the ease with which high-quality, unapproved photos and videos can be shared with millions.

There have been documented cases in which camera phone footage was used to help law enforcement officials solve crimes. In some cases, it exposed officers who were breaking the law. However, the majority of unauthorized footage in circulation does not fall into this category, and arguably, would not be classified as acts performed for the greater good of society.

Therefore, strangers who videotape others without their knowledge may appear to have a more malicious intent than friends who merely share received content with others. On the other hand, several generations have been exposed to TV shows like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and other blooper programs, so these strangers may view themselves as contributors to the ongoing comedic video process.

The proliferation of potentially embarrassing information has led many companies to adopt a Big Brother approach to monitoring the digital information of its employees. According to the website PrivacyRights.org, employees should be aware that any email typed at work is the property of the organization. Even if an employee deletes the email, the company can – and has the right to – retrieve it.

In a USA Today article, Kim Komando, host of The Kim Komando Show, warns that employers also have the right to monitor company-provided smart phones. In addition, there are keylogger applications that can secretly record the phone’s photos, videos, email, contacts and GPS location. Komando, whose talk radio show educates consumers on electronics, computers, and the Internet, supports an organization’s right to track phone usage since it is, after all, their phone, and she recommends purchasing a personal phone for personal use.

Companies also monitor other digital areas of employees’ lives to counter questionable behavior. Many organizations have a social media policy that prohibits employees from posting negative information about the company, since this is perceived as the most damaging type of behavior to an organization. However, PrivacyRights.org also notes that California, New York and Colorado are a few of the states that do not allow companies to discipline employees for questionable social media behavior unless it is specifically work-related.

The New York Times revealed the inception of monitoring software –called Social Sentry – that companies can purchase to track Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts of their employees. Tenerous, the software’s manufacturer, states that in addition to following the social media activities of their employees, companies can also track worker activity “on any device” and in “real time.”

Social Sentry can also be customized for automatic notifications and alerts, and it can create reports and analytics to determine employee usage. Nancy Flynn of the ePolicy Institute notes that social media leaves a trail that can be used in legal proceedings and supports the right of companies to use Social Sentry and other software to monitor this type of activity.

However, it is a morally grey issue. While it may be argued that a company has a right to monitor social activity performed during work hours or using the organization’s equipment, Facebook and Twitter are generally considered personal tools of communication. National Workrights Institute president Lewis Maltby acknowledges an organization’s right to protect its reputation and know what its employees are doing online, but worries that this level of social media monitoring may result in employees being fired for expressing their political beliefs, or making off-color comments.

Making the ethical waters even murkier, Social Sentry and other employee social monitoring software, merely collects information that is already publicly available. Anyone interested in researching an individual’s social media footprint has access to the same data.

In this respect, it could be argued that a company has the same right that everyone else does to access public social media information. Actually, it may have a greater right since the employee’s actions could cause irreparable damage to the organization. Monitoring social media provides companies with an opportunity to warn, reign in or even terminate toxic employees, and possibly avert a public scandal. On the other hand, “availability” may not be a valid justification to employees who bemoan their lack of privacy.

Ultimately, the best defense is a good offense, and since the practice of digital ethics varies greatly, individuals can best protect their privacy, reputation and possibly their career by limiting what they share online. A good rule of thumb: don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your boss or your worst enemy to see, because they probably will.

The Ethical Implications of Online Credit Applications

It happened without warning. As she was going through her divorce, Jane (whose name has been changed for anonymity) found out that her husband had applied for an American Express Card as her. Not for her. As her.

Knowing that her soon-to-be ex-husband had taken out fifteen or twenty credit cards during their last year of marriage to finance his lifestyle and girlfriend, Jane wasn’t too shocked to see an American Express card bill come to her door. But she was perplexed by the fact that it was 1) a collection notice and 2) in her name only. She immediately called the credit card company and was asked by the customer service representative for her name, social security number and the answer to a security question: her mother’s maiden name. When the rep told her that she gave the wrong name in response to that last question, Jane’s frustration reached its limit. “That’s because the person who applied for this card is not ME!” she said. She explained her situation and was told that the credit card was applied for online approximately eight months earlier. Her husband had been intercepting the mail at their home, but a recent overseas trip had caused a break in his intervention, which led to her discovery.

For Jane, the story has a happy ending. American Express immediately cancelled the card and held her harmless for the remaining balance. For many other people, however, the story runs more toward horror novel than fairy tale.

The advent of technological capabilities that allow complex financial transactions to be conducted in an online environment has raised several questions in the ethical arena, particularly regarding credit card applications.

In the past, potential credit applicants would meet with an individual at a bank or finance center (in the case of retail establishments) to determine their financial stability and apply for credit. Slowly over the years, a direct marketing technique was singled out as the best way to entice consumers with sweet credit deals, so credit card companies and even large retailers started presenting their offers via the postal service. You’d get an application in the mail, fill it out with pertinent information, sign it, and (hopefully) get approved. However, today’s wide availability of internet access has added a new dimension to the ubiquitous credit card application—now you can just point, click and send, and in no time, you can be approved.

In the first scenario, credit applicants are meeting with a person who is able to verify they have the correct information at hand and that they can produce a driver’s license or other identification to prove their identity. In the second scenario, featuring snail mail, applicants are at least required to produce a signature on the document. If there is a dispute over a false application, a signature can be an important piece of evidence.

But enter the online credit application. There is no evidence that you are in any way associated with the name you are applying for credit under. All you need is access to a few, easily acquired pieces of information. The website creditcardchaser.com publishes a list of what you will need to complete an online application, as follows:

- Basic personal information (full name, address, phone number, date of birth

- Social Security number

- Employer and personal income information

- Household income

- Bank account information for all accounts

- Whether you own or rent your home

- Monthly rent or mortgage payment amount

Any close personal relationship could garner access to all the above information. All one would have to do is fill out the information online, click and send. In fact, attorney Chad Johnson of the Johnson & Bryan law firm in Houston, Texas says that most cases of credit card identity fraud he sees are between an adult child and their parent or grandparent. This complicates the cases infinitely, since a police report and investigation is required to pursue identity fraud and hold the victim harmless of the credit charges. Most parents or grandparents are hesitant to take this type of action against their own child or grandchild, so they just pay the credit charges and move on.

Credit card companies that operate online are expected to implement a vulnerability management program, which gives a blueprint of how they intend to deal with credit card security threats and manage these issues if they arise. The problem is they don’t have reason to put money and effort into a system like this. As Johnson notes, “These credit companies simply sell uncollected debt to third party debt agencies like Portfolio Recovery Associates (PRA). American Express may sell a bulk package of charged off 'bad' credit card debt representing $99 million dollars in charges, interest and fees for $1 million to PRA and write off the difference. Then every penny PRA makes over the $1 million that they paid is pure profit, and American Express gets a nice write-off on their taxes.”

When they are set up correctly and working, vulnerability management programs include ways for the credit card companies to test and protect their extensive digital networks. Strong programs usually include access control measures, such as setting limits for the number of employees with access to sensitive data and providing secure passwords for system users that are authorized. But this does nothing to prevent an online application from being completed by an applicant who is operating under a fraudulent identity.

So what can credit companies do to anticipate and impede online fraudulent applications? There are several companies that offer fraud detection and prevention software that attempt to foil online fraudsters by searching for patterns of unusual behavior online. In fact, one company, iovation, suggests that instead of verifying the identification information of applicants, the reputation of the device (computer, cell phone or other internet access device) they are using should be verified instead, for greater security. Additional online technologies include geolocation by IP address, which can identify the exact location from which the person is applying. However, this only works if the fraudster is operating at a significant distance from the address of the victim, not if they are co-habiting. An application made from a free or anonymous email address should also trigger a fraud alert. An anonymous proxy server can allow internet users to hide their actual IP address, and a proxy server is usually used only to avoid being detected, so this makes it a big red flag for fraud. A mailing address on an online application that is a P.O. box or a drop shipment forwarding address should also be flagged for investigation before credit approval.

Once a red flag is flown, it is up to the credit card company to follow through with appropriate blocks such as:

- Contacting the applicant by telephone to request voice verification. (This would have worked particularly well for Jane, since the applicant was male).

- Placing a hold on an application that may be fraudulent.

- Refusing applications originating from free or anonymous emails and proxy servers.

- Refusing applications that don’t provide a valid street address.

- Authenticating the application using questions on historical personal data easily retrieved by credit card companies, such as: At which of these addresses did you reside in 1996? Which of the following people is related to you?

Recently there have been many cases of data and identity loss associated with hacking and poor security practices. Allowing creation of a credit card identity without proof positive of the applicant’s identity most definitely represents a security risk. Also, when providing personal data online, credit card companies should be liable for fraud that occurs as a result of tech support or other employees having access to the data on applications.

WISCO, a company that provides business and education software, sites simple customer callback as an effective way of preventing online credit application fraud. If the phone number given is the actual number of the individual whose identity is being undermined, calling will outwit the fraudster and alert the victim. If it is a bogus number, it will be disconnected, changed or non-existent and, if the fraudster uses their own phone number, companies can determine if the gender is the same as the applicant’s and also ask personal “security” questions.

Industry analysts feel that credit card companies have not fully come to grips with the size of the problem. An article by Ross Kerber notes that 4.46 cents was lost to fraud worldwide for every $100 of credit and debit transactions in 2010. Apparently, U.S. banks and merchants have been resistant to new protective technologies so the United States leads the pack in losses, accounting for nearly 47 percent of global fraud losses. According a LexisNexis study, The True Cost of Fraud, retailers lose over $100 billion in fraud each year, most of which is due to identity fraud.

Since identity fraud seems to be at the crux of the worldwide fraud loss scene and is certainly a huge problem for credit card companies, it seems logical to remedy the situation by intervention at the first point of contact: the credit card application. Since an online application is not only most prevalent but the most risky, this is where credit card agencies should focus their vulnerability management efforts.

Currently, many retailers are joining the push to online credit applications. Infinite Prospects, a company that helps car dealerships maximize their online presence, advocates the use of video credit applications to walk prospective car buyers through the credit process. If we take this a step further, perhaps credit card companies could supplement applications with Skype, FaceTime or other video identification of the applicant.

Companies such as Jumio now offer programs for retailers like netverify™ that allow identification to be scanned into a smartphone or other terminal to verify identity. This lets a photo ID, like a driver’s license, be scanned by an off-the-shelf webcam or smartphone camera, transmitted and verified online. Citi Group has invested an undisclosed amount in the company—one can only hope they intend to use the technology to support their own online application process for subsidiary lending institutions.

In summary, credit card companies recognize and understand the security risks of online applications and are aware of remedies extant that would mitigate the number of fraudulent applications made online. The problem is, with third party debt buyers standing by to purchase bad debt and identity fraud victims shouldering the losses, there is little impetus for credit card companies to tighten up their online security.

The Ethics of Planned Obsolescence

For gadget lovers, there is nothing as tempting as the newest version of the high-tech do-dad of the moment. For the rest of us, there is nothing as annoying as the latest update to a product we probably never fully understood or utilized to its true potential.

And with every update, there is the need to improve the accoutrements – the case, the earphones, the external keyboard, the car adapter. The frustration—in addition to the cost— begs the question: What moral code, if any, do companies follow when they create products that change so frequently? And are there any ethical standards for the product designers who craft our misery?

The answer, according to a sampling of business owners and product designers, is as complicated as the smartphones we all carry in our pockets these days. Especially within the realm of electronics, things change rapidly through natural progression of the creative process, the needs of the marketplace and customer demand. Fashion, be it clothing or the kind of technology we use, is by its nature fast and fickle, always seeking something new or different.

Yet there is a universal agreement that the highest consideration should be given to the needs of the user, the community, society in general and the environment in particular. Creating a never-ending flow of new products may temporarily state the human animal in its endless thirst for amusement. But it curses us as well, creating waste without much if any thought to where it ends up. And without some demand for sustainable products, manufacturers and thereby designers will never step up to do what is right for many rather than what is convenient for a few.

The issue is particularly notable with the changes in the iPhone. The latest iteration, the iPhone 5, had so many changes and improvements that upgrading became even more tempting. For example, the 5 has a much larger screen than its little sister, the 4S. It has a better camera and video capabilities. It has faster data speed. And it has new earbuds and a dock connector, and is a smaller and more flexible version, according to the company.

So even if you felt satisfied with your previous phone and did not want to replace it, it is challenging to avoid upgrading if you need to change your contract or provider. And it is hard to skip a vastly superior product, like the updated earbuds, because they are now designed to fit better in your ear and give you higher-quality sound.

Not to state the obvious, but it is clear that maintaining a product over time is not a priority within the electronics industry, experts note.

“Electronics are challenging because they are inherently obsolete from the moment they’re being shipped,” noted Thomas J. Newhouse. Newhouse has been designing furniture, lighting and other products as the owner and principal of an industrial design consulting firm in Western Michigan for more than 30 years.

Newhouse’s specialty is design that considers its environmental footprint or sustainability from its inception. He has followed this philosophy with a passion, trying to create durable products in a largely throw-away society. Based on these beliefs, Newhouse is quick to say that he would not want to design electronics because of the so-called planned obsolescence that defines the industry.

To him, the thought process of coming up with a gadget such as an iPhone 5 or 6 or beyond is flawed from the start, as companies including Apple fail to think about what happens to everything that came before when the new model is released.

“They’re not well-thought out in a cradle-to-cradle manner, so they’re unlikely to be recycled,” Newhouse said. “There should be a well-developed ‘take-back’ program or incentives to recycle when you upgrade. That’s the manufacturer’s responsibility” and the designers by proxy.

There are many ways to reduce or eliminate a product’s environmental impact beyond recycling, Newhouse argues. To use the iPhone 5 example, Apple’s designers and companies should have thought about how to integrate previous products into the new design. By enlarging the new phone, it causes every owner to shed their old product and related gear without a second thought. Those who seek to live “green” have no choice, and a whole lot more plastic ends up in the garbage heap.

Working within the apparel and accessory industry gives Debbie Thelen Miller a slightly different viewpoint. Miller is the inventor of Hugrz Boot Wraps, a product that allows people to change the look of their existing boots by adding her product over the top.

Miller started the business as a way to keep her feet warm during her child’s hockey practices and games. As a female and as a savvy business owner, Miller knows that a portion of her designs have to be new and original to garner new customers. Yet she also has to offer standard or classic designs year over year, with the goal being not to change so rapidly that she alienates those who prefer a traditional or conservative look. Others may want to repurchase a look they previously liked or owned.

“There are things that are classic, like the Fair Isle pattern. That is something that is never going to go out of style,” Miller said. “We’ve tried to work with what is the American way. We’re always looking for something bigger and better by offering core products that are timeless and integrating trends to keep the look fresh.”

Designers face a bevy of issues when they sit down to create a new product, Miller said. Chief among them is the balance between cost and perceived value. This has been key to her product, largely because people may have spent hundreds of dollars on their boots: they can update their look with a Hugz rather than going out and buying another equally expensive pair.

“You want to create a product that has a value to it and can justify the pricing. A lot of disposable products are just that: you don’t want to spend the money on them because they’re not going to last,” Miller said. “So it is harder to justify a higher price tag to the consumer, and that ultimately may affect whether you’re able to stay in business long term.”

Retail is a tricky thing. You don’t want to keep everything the same forever; that would prevent people from having to buy replacement or new items at the speed needed to sustain a serious enterprise.

Sadly, consumers may have no choice within some arenas, such as computers or smartphones. Recently, I had a computer-repair person visit my home to see if his team of experts could update or upgrade my desktop computer. The goal was to extend its life, as it was only five years old. To me, it was a fairly new piece of equipment.

Right away, you could tell it was not going to be a pleasant conversation. The repairman was nice enough, but he told me bluntly that my computer was junk. He offered to help me pick it up and toss it out of my second-story office window, because that probably would be the kindest thing to do in its infirm state.

In the end, my family chose not to upgrade the desktop by making some easy repairs. Instead, we purchased a new laptop. The desktop will be recycled to the best of our ability. But when you think about the fact that we also have furniture, dishes and even some clothing that is older than Justin Bieber (and all of it is still going strong) it seems a huge waste to junk something that is only five years old.

If you have ever seen the children’s movie, “Wall-e,” you know what the possible outcome is to our excessive consumerism: It is world full of trash where cleaning up after our disposable society has become so burdensome that we must flee our planet. This might be worst-case scenario, but it doesn’t feel so far from the truth.

We are in a constant state of rush these days, whether it is in our personal or professional lives. We have access to so much information and so many products. We are blessed beyond measure in the United States, and it is amazing to have so many options. But we face a huge moral dilemma with products like the iPhone and others: do we upgrade because we want to or do we limp along with older technology because it is the “right” thing to do?

The Trend Toward Falsifying Online Reviews

I love to shop online. And I am savvy, too. I always research the product in question, although admittedly, some of my “research” includes checking out the product reviews. I don’t even consider products that get below four stars, and I generally stop to sift through the reviews for even four-star products to see why they didn’t receive a perfect score. I even look at the distribution of stars -- how many one-, two- and three-star reviews any four-star product averaged. I thought I was being discerning, but I was actually getting scammed—at least some of the time.

Recently, as I was clicking through reviews of an Amazon product, I started noticing some anomalies. In particular, one reviewer posted how her husband loved to use the product in question, but when I clicked on the “see all my reviews” button, I noticed one of her other reviews mentioned her wife. And apparently she (or he) never met a product s/he didn’t like, as all the reviews were glowingly positive. What the heck?

Fake reviewing has been rampant for years. A Wall Street Journal article chronicled the confession of a fake Amazon reviewer back in 2009 and a shakeup in Amazon’s Canadian site outed many review counterfeiters as early as 2004.

Posting fake reviews, or “astroturfing,” as it is called, is big business and it is getting bigger. What is the impetus for these dishonest postings? As an inquiring mind that wanted to know, I took a closer look.

Why Do People Write Fake Reviews?

One good answer is supply and demand. The Internet has been an incubator for many rags-to-riches businesses and the trend toward false review production has Internet magnate hopefuls in a frenzy. One of the most recent cases of fraudulent reviews involves an Oklahoma man who began selling book reviews for $99 each, playing off the advent of easy, inexpensive e-book self-publishing that has new authors vying for readership dollars. In no time, he was netting $28,000 a month and was the proud owner of a flourishing online business, GettingBookReviews.com. Alas, a disgruntled customer who felt she waited too long for her review blasted him on some consumer sites and hastened his end. Once Google caught on to him, they shut down his advertising account and Amazon took down most of his reviews.

In addition to garnering positive publicity for a product or service, stealthy Internet businesses also pay to slam the competition by having reviewers write negative posts, comments and reviews on a competitor’s site.

Some reviews are meant to be funny commentary on a product, such as the numerous reviews for the Bic for Her pens that garnered several tongue-in-cheek responses, such as this one-star review:

I bought this pen (in error, evidently) to write my reports of each day’s tree felling activities in my job as a lumberjack. It is no good. It slips from between my calloused, gnarly fingers like a gossamer thread gently descending to earth between two giant redwood trunks.

Obviously, this is not meant to be an accurate review of the product, and anyone who reads it would know as much. But what if you didn’t click through to the reviews? The pens received a 3 star rating after 188 (mostly fake) posters gave it one star. Using my own online shopping criteria (four stars or better to even look at it), these false reviews would cause me to bypass this product.

Others write fake reviews to bolster a political or religious philosophy, and still others to promote their own (or slam competitor’s) products. As I noted earlier, in 2004 the New York Times covered a temporary hiccup in Canada’s Amazon site whereby thousands of anonymous posters’ identities were uncovered. This glitch “outed” John Rechy, author of “The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens” who gave his book a five star review under cover of “a reader from Chicago.” This illustrates a fault of many rating systems: that anyone can anonymously post a review. Authors or business owners can corral family members, friends and co-workers to post glowing missives while ex-spouses, ex-girlfriends, a disgruntled family member or a competitor can post a vituperative smack-down with little fear of retribution.

Who Writes Them?

With another nod to the system of supply and demand, an entire industry has sprung up around the manipulation of online reviews. I listened to a radio advertisement for half a year on my way to work that promoted a service to “fix” spurious negative Internet reviews by repairing a business’s online reputation. I never gave a thought to how that fix was going to occur until my eyes were opened to the whole fake review situation. In writing this article, I did a little research into these “reputation managers.” On the whole, they focus on small business owners and offer to “fix” bad reviews by hiding them under a deluge of positive ones. These positive reviews can come as blog posts, product reviews and social media sites. Some shady companies even offer to bury negative posts from sites like ComplaintsBoard.com and RipoffReport.com and keep negative Better Business Bureau ratings from turning up in casual searches.

Besides employees of “reputation management” companies, there are other individuals, such as freelance writers, who often write fake reviews. Many online freelance writing mills regularly solicit contractors to write reviews. Just for fun, I plugged in “write reviews” into one of the more popular freelance writing job search engines. Although the search turned up several seemingly legitimate review opportunities such as one that covered the cost of the e-book to be reviewed plus an additional amount for the written review, there were plenty of offers like this:

URGENT: Excellent English Writers needed for writing Product Reviews

We need Writers who can write Excellent Product/Business Reviews in English. Reviews will be 200 to 400 Characters each and will require a Total of 10 Minutes Maximum per Review to Write.

Please Bid your Price for each Set of 100 Reviews

It doesn’t seem possible to buy, use and review a product in ten minutes, does it?

I also checked into Fiverr, the website that allows people to offer just about any service imaginable for $5 and for employers to post $5 jobs. I plugged in the words “product reviews” and pulled up a slew of people willing to write product reviews, including the following:

You will receive a brand new, original, custom, product review testimonial that praises promotes your product/service. This review testimonial will explode your sales; compel your readers to click through and BUY more, more often. Ideal for website landing pages, sales letters, ads, advertisements and banners. Our professional copywriters will give your products and services credibility and help you increase your sales.

One posting I found on Freelancer.com asks outright for someone to write and post positive reviews about their company. In the job description, they add that they are willing to “...send examples of comments our customers have sent us to use and refer to as well.” Another listing on the same site advertises for a Product Review Writer and notes that the tone of the review should be “...that of a satisfied customer or satisfied user.” Nice.

Catching Up with Fake Reviewers

In 2009, then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo of New York announced a settlement with the plastic surgery franchise Lifestyle Lift over the publishing of false consumer reviews. The company paid a $300,000 fine in this first-ever case regarding fake online reviewing. It seems that besides directing employees to spend slow business days writing positive reviews online, the company also created entire websites dedicated to fake satisfied customers. Over the years, false review cases that have received press have mounted although many are settled without financial retribution.

To deal with the rising numbers of deceptive reviews online, the FTC revised its truth-in-advertising guidelines—the first revision since the 1980s. It has determined that posting fake reviews is illegal under the truth in advertising guidelines and affirmed their position that any relationship (personal or business) to the seller must be disclosed by a reviewer.

Luckily for the consumer, both Microsoft and Google are getting wise to online fakery and are cognizant of the upward trend in false reviews that is currently undermining the credibility of ratings. In particular, they are pursuing research that will help uncover the patterns that fake reviewers follow. Bing Liu, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois is currently working with Microsoft and Google personnel to develop software that will offer detection. Mr. Liu states:

“To detect fake reviews, researchers and companies have built detection models using linguistic features (or signals) from the review text content, and meta-data features such as the star rating, user ID of the reviewer, the time when the review was posted, the host IP address, MAC address of the reviewer's computer, the geo-location of the reviewer, etc...”.

Mr. Liu estimates that almost one-third of Internet reviews are falsified and that number is bound to increase as Internet usage and dependence grows.

Google is also sponsoring the work of professor Yejin Choi of the State University of New York-Stony Brook, who is developing a program that can expose deceptive reviews with 72 percent accuracy. Choi was instrumental in developing the highly touted Cornell University algorithm that distinguished false from real reviews about 90 percent of the time, and is using that research as a basis for her program.

How to Spot Fake Reviews on your Own

So what’s an Internet shopper to do? Without savvy detection programming or fancy algorithms, how can the average online consumer protect himself from fraudulent practices?

First, use your instincts. If a review is too over-the-top or reads like a commercial--it probably is one. Lists of product features are a sure giveaway, as is copious praise. Even the best of products is flawed in some way. Next, look at the date of the review. If, for example, a new book gleans a barrage of reviews within a day of its debut, buyer beware! You can also take a close look at the names of reviewers. Are they all similar, such as fleefly456, fleefly983 and fleefly1042? This may be a red flag, so check out the other reviews they have written. If you find similar language in all of them, you are probably looking at someone who is cranking them out for profit.

Finally, be cautious of five stars. This one resonates with me, since I typically shop only amongst the four- and five-star items online. If a product gets nothing but five stars from hundreds of people, it is likely that you are looking at a case of fakery.

Of course, just knowing that fake reviews and websites exist is the first step in protecting yourself from being defrauded. With Internet competition on the rise, “reputation management” is becoming serious business. Unless more companies like Google and Amazon self-regulate, we are likely to see things get worse before they get better. The FTC’s keen interest in online practices is a hopeful sign, but there needs to be many more cases brought to light before the risks of writing fraudulent reviews outweigh the benefits.

The Ethics of Anonymous Comments

Anyone who has spent time online has run across comments sections on websites that make you feel like taking a bath and then shutting down the Internet forever. People have always behaved like asses, of course, but there's something special about the Web that turns otherwise reasonable folks into mindlessly gibbering obscenity delivery systems.

That "special something" seems, at least in part, to be anonymity. In a piece on Slate, Farhad Manjoo pointed to several social science studies which show that people tend to act less civilly when they don't have to use their real names.

"Letting people remain anonymous while engaging in fundamentally public behavior encourages them to behave badly," said Manjoo. He added that the Internet should move towards real name policies in all venues, whether comments sections, restaurant reviews or Reddit posts.

"In almost all cases," he argues, "the Web would be much better off if everyone told the world who they really are." There's certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence for Manjoo's position. Sportswriter Jeff Pearlman, for example, writes about tracking down a particularly vicious anonymous troll — and discovering that, in person and under his own name, the guy was both pleasant and deeply embarrassed.

For my own part, the worst troll I ever dealt with on my site, The Hooded Utilitarian, started off using his real name…but eventually decided that he didn't want people Googling him and discovering his online unpleasantness. So he adopted an alias specifically so he could say whatever he wanted without fear of the consequences.

I did eventually ban my troll. But I never forced him to use his real name. In fact, I allow anonymous comments and even anonymous contributors on my site. No doubt Manjoo would be appalled.

And yet, while I'm sure he'd disagree with me, Manjoo himself actually explains why I believe that, despite the possible uptick in incivility, it is important not to require real names policies online. This is what Manjoo says:

" In all but the most extreme scenarios—everywhere outside of repressive governments—anonymity damages online communities."

That exception, slipped between the hyphens, seems to me to be extremely important. What Manjoo is admitting there is that anonymity functions to protect the vulnerable. In certain situations, in certain societies, some people cannot safely speak out. Anonymity can help protect them (though sometimes, of course, even that doesn't work.)

Again, Manjoo limits the need for protective anonymity to people living under repressive governments. The presupposition, then, is that our own government and society is so free, and so equal, and so fair, that such protections are not necessary.

But one only needs to state this theorem clearly to see that it is nonsense. The US is not a utopia. Power disparities and injustice exist here, as they do in even the best human society. Some people have less power than others. Some people face discrimination and prejudice. As long as that is the case, some people will be in a position where anonymity is a necessary protection.

As just one example, consider the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, which required gay men and women to hide their sexual identity on pain of being expelled form the armed forces. Though Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed last year, there is still prejudice against queer people in our society. Gays and lesbians may face harassment or even the loss of their jobs if they come out to acquaintances, family, or coworkers.

As a result, many gays, lesbians, trans and queer folk still hide their sexuality because of entirely reasonable fears that revealing it would put their jobs or their well-being at risk. A real name policy across the web would mean that these people would either have to out themselves to every passing search engine or else avoid speaking about their sexuality online — effectively turning the Internet into a giant closet.

Along these lines, Kirrily “Skud” Robert did a survey of people whose accounts were suspended due to violations of Google+'s real name policy. Here are some of the reasons respondents gave for using aliases online.

- “I’ve been stalked. I’m a rape survivor. I am a government employee that is prohibited from using my IRL.

- “I use the pseudonym to maintain my online anonymity because I am polyamorous and have no desire for professional acquaintances to discover this.”

- “I enjoy being part of a global and open conversation, but I don’t wish for my opinions to offend conservative and religious people I know or am related to. Also I don’t want my husband’s Govt career impacted by his opinionated wife, or for his staff to feel in any way uncomfortable because of my views.”

Again, I'm in contact with quite a few people who use aliases online, and their reason are similar to the ones Robert found. There are queer people who aren't out to friends or family, or who simply don't want their queerness to be the first thing that shows up when people Google them. Others, mostly women, are concerned about being stalked or harassed. There are teachers who don't want their students learning every detail of their lives. And so forth.

Danah Boyd, a social media researcher argues that "The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. 'Real names' policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people," she said.

She adds: "Just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. … And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so.”

The fact that anonymity may further marginalize the powerless doesn't change the fact that it may also promote incivility. Anonymity allows people to evade social norms. Often this can be bad. In most cases, you don't want people evading social norms that bar profanity, or rudeness. Nor, for that matter, do you want them using anonymity to evade norms that bar racism or sexism or homophobia.

On the other hand, social norms are often the norms of people in power. Social norms, in some cases and communities in the United States, say that individuals should not be gay, that teachers shouldn’t say anything controversial, or that women who speak up are fair game for harassment. For people who are disempowered, the anonymity of the Internet can be a partial release from the norms that disempower them.

One recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Haifa found that teenagers actually benefited when they used pseudonyms online. "The sense of anonymity and invisibility experienced by Internet users promotes their confidence to express thoughts and feelings," the study argued.

In her discussion of these findings, Erica Newland at the Center for Democracy and Technology also highlighted findings from a study by Google that suggest that anonymity may not be the spur to incivility that it seems to be. When Google+ loosened their real names policies, for example, they found that people did not behave all that differently. As Yonatan Zunger, a Google employee commented, "bastards are still bastards under their own names."

Rather than becoming ever more draconian in their real name demands, then, sites might consider trying to compromise. They could, for instance, require registration to comment, but allowing people to register with aliases. They could simply close comments, perhaps printing selected anonymous emailed reader comments in posts, as blogger Andrew Sullivan has long done. Or smaller sites could do what I do — which is let anyone comment, but moderate threads closely so they don't deteriorate into name-calling or abuse.

Certainly, there's no one answer to dealing with these problems. But I do think it's important to acknowledge that real names are not a cure-all for abusive behavior. If we lived in a perfectly just, perfectly free, perfectly equal society, perhaps there wouldn’t be a reason for people to be anonymous online. But we don't, and there is.

Faking Photos: The Ethics of Photo Manipulation

In the wild days of yellow journalism, manipulated photos were common. Hearst newspapers and the New York Evening Graphic were among the more notorious for the altered images they printed in the early decades of the 20^th century while claiming that the pictures were genuine and un-retouched.

Journalistic standards have changed for the better since that era of anything-goes photojournalism. But photo manipulation is not yet extinct. In fact, photo manipulation is much easier now in an era of photo-editing computer software than it was when an air brush was a principal tool of retouching.

Among the more infamous altered news photos of recent times are the following:

- A photo of the dead Osama bin Laden published on the Internet on May 2, 2011, was reputedly a doctored image, part of which was an archived picture of his face pasted onto another individual's body. This marriage of two separate images became an iconic picture of the dead Al-Qaida leader.

- Two government officials were digitally removed from an official White House photograph of President Obama and high level staff members following the Navy SEAL mission to kill bin Laden on a TV monitor. The people removed from the photograph were Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Counter Terrorism Director Audrey Tomason. The doctored photo ran in an Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn newspaper, Di Tzeitung.

- Even journalism's distinguished "gray lady," The New York Times, ran a digitally altered photo in April, 2007. A Times employee altered a photo to restore a misalignment of a building siding and remove a white area on a photograph. The Times published a correction and noted its policy against photographic alteration.

- At least one case of photo manipulation has been uncovered in academia. In an attempt to proclaim the diversity of the student body at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the cover of a brochure was changed to include a black male in crowd of students at a football game.

One of the more noteworthy examples of digital photo manipulation was the Time magazine cover portrait of O.J. Simpson which ran on June 27, 1994. The Time photo of O.J., taken from a police mug shot, was altered to darken his skin, to reduce the clarity of the image, and to present the subject with a growth of facial stubble. The effect is sinister. Newsweek's cover of the same un-altered photo of O.J. reveals the difference in images.

Today such photo fakery is rare in responsible news media, although still not entirely. Major news purveyors – print, broadcast and online – have strict policies against digital manipulation of photographs with severe penalties for violators, summary termination, included.

Photojournalist Val Mazzenga worked for the Chicago Tribune for almost 40 years and was the first at that newspaper to use a digital camera. He is a member of the National Press Photographers Association, and has been inducted into The Photographer's Hall of Fame. He also taught photography at the University of Illinois, Champaign.

As the first photojournalist at the Tribune to use a digital camera, Mazzenga was able to help his fellow photographers become familiar with its new capabilities - and potential abuses - as digital photography became more widely used.

"When digital came in, most [Tribune] photographers hated it," says Mazzenga. "One of the first problems was that the flash didn't synch with the camera [shutter].

Almost simultaneous with the widespread introduction of digital cameras was the development of photo-editing computer software, most notably Adobe Photoshop.

"The Tribune had strict rules against manipulating photographs," says Mazzenga. "If you did it and got caught, you got fired."

Nobody was dismissed at the Tribune during Mazzenga's tenure for altering a photograph, he recalls. But a photographer for the L.A. Times, a Tribune company, was fired for altering a shot taken in Iraq. "He removed trees [with digital editing software] from the image," said Mazzenga.

Every major newspaper has the same tough rules against changing a photographic image, according to Mazzenga.

Nevertheless, media policy may allow minor alterations of photographic images for contrast and clarity.

"The Tribune permitted its photographers to change a picture but only in ways that did not change the story," says Mazzenga. "You could enhance a foreground figure, for example, or create more contrast between foreground and background for visibility."

Nothing radical beyond these alterations was allowed. "You couldn't put people in a shot or take anyone out," says Mazzenga. Cropping and lighting changes were permitted if these alterations did not change the meaning of the picture.

World-famous photographer Arnold Crane, whose work hangs in museums around the world including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the New York Metropolitan, among others, was a freelance crime photographer in his youth, decades before the introduction of digital cameras.

"I worked the police beat and sold pictures to all the Chicago papers," says Crane, who began working the streets with his camera while in his late teens. He is now 80 years old and still shooting with both film and digital cameras.

"A digitally manipulated photograph is an illustration, not a news photograph," said Crane. "But some alterations are alright. You can remove an [obscuring] highlight or a reflection in a window, but you can't remove an object. And you can't change the meaning of a photograph."

Crane regards any alteration of an image that changes the meaning of a photograph as unethical, and sufficient grounds for dismissal from a news outlet.

Although Crane uses computer photo editing software on his photographs, he is judicious in its applications, and has strict, self-imposed rules.

"I took a portrait of a woman and [digitally] removed a zit from her face," he said. "That's where I draw the line."

Changes such as these, according to Crane, are acceptable and similar to dodging and burning in, methods of enhancing photographic prints from film. Dodging is the holding back of projected image on a print by an enlarger. Burning in is a means of accentuating a visual area of a print by permitting extended time under the light of the enlarger.

Crane, a member of the elite White House News Photographers Association, believes there's been few egregious examples of photo tampering in journalistic media the past few years. "I would like to think photographers are more principled these days," he said. "I subscribe entirely to the ethical standards of The National Press Photographers Association.”

Photo alteration is common in advertising and fashion photography, according to Olaf Moetus, a former creative director at McCann Ericson, New York, one of the country's largest advertising agencies. Moetus is currently the founder and owner of Moetus Creative Services, full-spectrum marketing, communications and Website design consultancy.

"Photo editing software is very versatile and has numerous capabilities," Moetus said. "You can make a person look thinner, or younger. You can remove a double chin, you can make food look more delicious and appetizing – think redder apples and juicier steaks."

Moetus points out that there are advertising industry standards and government regulations forbidding the misrepresentation of products and services in ads and TV commercials.

"But practically every photo for advertising purposes has been altered," said Moetus. "What's unethical is faking product features. For example, an altered photograph of a brownie showing more nuts in the product than the real amount is not acceptable."

Publicity photographs of movie stars, political figures and other categories of celebrity or public figure, are also routinely altered to be more flattering to the subject.

Fashion photographer Stan Malinowski, has photographed some of the world's most beautiful models in his more than thirty-year career including Christie Brinkley, Cheryl Tiegs, Isabella Rossellini and Elle MacPherson. His photographs have been published in Vogue, Bazaar, Playboy, Penthouse, Time, Bazaar Italia, French Bazaar, Paris Vogue and numerous other domestic and foreign publications.

Malinowski photographed models before the advent of photo-editing software. In those days, raw film was turned into the client. If retouching were done, it was not done by the photographer.

In an e-mail reply to questions about photo manipulation in advertising and fashion today, Malinowski wrote, "I ...believe that smoothing of faces and complexion would be expected, and the thinning and lengthening of parts of an image."

As for altered images that run in journalistic media – print, broadcast or online --

Malinowski wrote, "I believe that all mainstream media will not allow any manipulation of journalistic images — and that's as it should be."

Although ethical standards for photojournalists have been codified, in the earliest days of digital camera use in journalism, the ethical code for digital photography had not yet been fully established.

Deborah Kravitz, a documentary photographer and former employee of the Tucson Citizen, has a degree in visual journalism, but was not required to take a course in photojournalistic ethics. She recalled that there wasn't even such a class in her curriculum.

"I was trained in photojournalistic ethics, verbally, by my managing editor," says Kravitz. "The rest I learned on the job."

Now, however, many colleges and universities offer courses in the ethics and legalities of photojournalism as part of the standard curriculum for students seeking a degree.

Manipulated photographs for political purposes, especially those of dictators, is probably common, although no current, reliable data on that subject has been found.

In the former Soviet Union, for example, where the government controlled the press, doctored photos were common.

The late Josef Stalin, for example, ruthless dictator of the U.S.S.R., was not only a mass murderer, by executive order, of groups and individuals who opposed his draconian rule.

In a photograph taken about 1930, a dissident Communist commissar was removed via air brush from a government photograph. Today, that primitive, tedious method of changing a photo is easily accomplished with Adobe Photoshop, and other photo editing software programs. Official photographs issued by dictatorial or totalitarian regimes may not be visually truthful.

Freelance photojournalists, being self-employed, are not bound by the restrictions imposed on news media employees. Freelancers are restricted only by their own integrity. They may enhance a photograph to make it more salable to a wire service, such as the Associated Press, or to a newspaper, both of which often buy photographs from outside sources. If caught substantially manipulating photographs, however, media editors aware of the deception would probably never again buy the freelancer’s work.

The camera may never lie, as the saying goes. But digital photo editing software can lie and often does. But generally speaking, you can trust that the pictures run in America's major news media have not been substantially changed. Still, there are watchdogs, both in-house at journalistic media outlets, and others outside, ever vigilant for photo fakery, ready to blow the whistle when it occurs, and committed to punishing the violator.

Homeland Security, the FBI and Social Media

“Terrorism.” “Drug War.” “Bomb.” “Social Media.”

If we were playing a game where you had to choose which word doesn’t belong, the answer would be “social media.” But in fact, all of the above words are related…at least according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a DHS subcontractor was hired to monitor online forums, blogs, message boards, public websites and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for specific keywords. In DHS terminology, these keywords are referred to as “Items of Interest” or “IOIs”. The DHS has divided the targeted IOIs into a series of categories, ranging from “terrorism” and “H1N1” to “domestic security” and “cyber security.” (You can view the complete list of keywords here; note that new search terms may be added as natural or manmade disasters occur). Based on this data, real-time IOI reports are then generated.

Reuters reports that “the purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to ‘collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.’” Government responses, such as to “the 2010 earthquake and aftermath in Haiti and security and border control related to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia” are supposed to be made easier via IOI-monitoring.

EPIC, however, believes the monitoring is unjustified, and in December 2011, began suing the DHS over covert surveillance of Facebook and Twitter. As a result of this initial Freedom of Information lawsuit, EPIC obtained more than 300 pages of documents detailing the DHS’ surveillance program. Then EPIC proposed that the DHS suspend the program, “warning that this activity violates First Amendment rights.” Eventually, Congress got involved, and a hearing on ‘DHS Monitoring of Social Networking and Media: Enhancing Intelligence Gathering and Ensuring Privacy’ called.

In fact, this hearing called into question further agencies, such as the FBI, which began circulating a six-page RFI, or “Request for Information,” that details a “social media application” they are trying to build. According to the RFI, this application would “improv[e] the FBI’s overall situational awareness” by monitoring “user updates on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, along with news reports from Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.” (You can read the complete RFI here).

As everyday internet users we may ask ourselves: how effective is this uncovering of IOIs? And how is our privacy ensured?

Consumer advocate Christopher Elliott argues that “there is no evidence I'm aware of that any terrorist or criminal has been caught through social media.” In fact, non-criminals, such as barman Leigh Van Bryan, have been arrested for tweeting “destroy” and “America” in that order.

To be exact, Leigh Van Bryan (@leighbryan) tweeted: “@MelissaxWalton free this week for a quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America? x”. The Daily Mail later reported that, according to Van Bryan, the “term 'destroy' was British slang for 'party'.” Despite that, it was not enough to convince the officials at the LAX airport; “on suspicion of planning to 'commit crimes',” Van Bryan was detained and had his passport confiscated. After 12 hours in custody, Van Bryan and his friend Emily Blunt, also detained, “returned to the airport where they were handed documents which stated they had been refused entry to the US. Emily's charge sheet stated: 'It is believed that you are traveling with Leigh-Van Bryan who possibly has the intentions of coming to the United States to commit crimes.',” the Daily Mail reports. Both of them now have to apply for visas at the U.S. embassy if they wish to re-enter the United States.

Others have questioned the effectiveness of social media monitoring, responding to the DHS’ approach with sarcasm. Joel Johnson of Animal New York, for example, wrote: “Yes, the Department of Homeland Security is searching social media for…‘social media’.” The Daily Mail, too, characterized the DHS’ choice of IOIs as ‘broad, vague and ambiguous’ – and thus ineffective.

Adam Montella, who has 27 years of direct homeland security and emergency management experience in government and private industry, in contrast speaks in favor of the IOI tracking:

“Prior to 9/11, intelligence agencies had some knowledge that terrorists were planning some sort of attack with airplanes. However, even at the federal level, intelligence and law enforcement agencies kept very compartmentalized (need to know) information and the pieces were not put together fast enough to paint the entire picture. Since then, there is more a more coordinated flow of this type of information, partially due to the very creation of the Department of Homeland Security where 22 separate agencies were brought together under one umbrella. Dozens, if not hundreds of potential acts of violence or terrorism have been stopped by the DHS and other national defense agencies employing this practice.”

According to Montella, intelligence agencies have been using similar techniques for years to listen for “chatter” from suspected terrorists and anarchist groups. “Social media sites are now the electronic bulletin board of today,” and are therefore subject to monitoring, he explains.

But according to Elliott, IOI monitoring is “no more [ethical] than listening to any conversation we have in private with our friends. And just because they can do it doesn't make it right.”

There are several additional factors to keep in mind, like how the DHS is obtaining the data and how privacy is ensured.

Forbes writer Revuen Cohen, notes that “reading through the Desktop Binder, I discovered the DHS Twitter account is @dhsnocmmc1 and DHS appears to be using tweetdeck to monitor the various keywords.” EPIC, however, argues that monitoring goes beyond Tweetdeck: “The program would be executed, in part, by individuals who established fictitious usernames and passwords to create covert social media profiles to spy on other users.”

With regards to ensuring privacy, Johnson says, “To be fair, the DHS does have an internal privacy policy that attempts to strip your ‘PII’–Personally Identifiable Information–from the aggregated tweets and status updates, with some broad exceptions,” he writes, citing specific clauses pertaining to PII use here. According to Mashable, “the FBI’s RFI [request for information] [also] specifically targets “publicly available information” — rather than anything users keep private.”

Gordon Hull, who teaches courses in ethics and technology at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, disagrees: “if they [the DHS] are really stripping the data of personally identifiable information, that seems a lot better. Privacy basically is secured when you separate an identity from an action – so if all they are doing is looking at patterns of word use, the privacy risk is less obvious.”

As individual users, we ultimately need to protect ourselves and our privacy. “We need to be aware that we're being watched. We need to watch what we say, even to our friends,” says Elliott. Montella concurs:

“Too many social media users utilize Facebook, Twitter, and other sites as an ‘online diary.’ One should not have any expectation of privacy when it comes to potential matters of national or homeland security. Freedom of speech can be argued, but the argument goes out the window much like it does when someone yells fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire, or someone phones in a bomb threat. Once you hit the “post” button, you are publishing a document in cyberspace.”

Elliott adds, “There is no such thing as privacy.”

On the one hand, Hull suggests that you can be “proactive in complaining when companies like Facebook [sic] abuse [your] privacy.” More than just protecting our own privacy, however, Montella believes that, “as users, we have an ethical obligation to report any suspected acts of violence or terrorism.” As a rule of thumb, he advises: “Ask yourself would a reasonable person believe this to be terrorism or worth reporting? If the answer is yes, you could help prevent the unthinkable from happening.”

As with numerous other cyber security and ethics issues, the problem is that social networking sites and other internet phenomena are still relatively new, and the appropriate laws have either not been established, or are just in the process of being established. Until an organization like EPIC is able to prevent DHS or FBI from monitoring our interactions online, all we as individual users can do is act with caution and common sense. Whit McGhee comments on a Mashable article: “If you’re not looking to threaten the United States, then you have nothing to worry about.” Daniel J. Solove, author of Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security, would disagree:

“One can usually think of something that even the most open person would want to hide. As a commenter to my blog post noted, ‘If you have nothing to hide, then that quite literally means you are willing to let me photograph you naked? And I get full rights to that photograph—so I can show it to your neighbors?’”

Stoney Burke, Hawaii Five-0, and Copyrights

When we create websites, we need two things: text and pictures. The text informs, while the pictures draw in the reader and illustrate points made in the text. There is a proper way to acquire and use photographs, ways that often are called into question as society decides how to apply the rules of ethics and copyright to Internet applications.

Many webmasters grab photographs from wherever they can find them, especially from online sources. They mistakenly believe that anything online is in the public domain. It is not. Just as copyright law protects photographs in newspapers and magazines, it protects photographs on the Internet.

Some webmasters believe they may post a photograph as long as they cite the photographer or the source where they found it. Although this is the correct way to handle a quotation, it is not for photographs. A quotation is a very small portion of a complete work, while a photograph is a complete work.

Sometimes, a webmaster finds a photograph but is unable to learn who took it or owns the copyright. Perhaps it is an old photograph without markings to identify the photographer. Perhaps, identifying the photographer reveals he has passed away. Does that mean the picture is in the public domain, or must the webmaster identify and locate the photographer’s heirs?

We need to know what we can do – legally and ethically – to acquire photographs for our websites when the odds seem stacked against us.

What Do the Experts Say?

1. The definition of the word “ethical” is ambiguous. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines“ethical” in four ways, one of which is relevant to this discussion. Ethical is “conforming to accepted standards of conduct”. Does that mean it is alright to use a picture if everyone else is doing so? Dictionary.com offers a clearer definition: “Ethical” is “pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of morality; pertaining to right and wrong in conduct.”
2. Since 1923, federal law has regulated copyrights in the United States. The law has changed several times, but currently is stipulated in the US Copyright Act of 1976, otherwise known as Title 17 of the United States Code. The Code states, “Copyright in a work… vests initially in the author… of the work… In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author…” The law is the same for photographs; thus, we need only substitute “photographer” where “author” appears to know where we stand. The Codegoes on to say, “Where an author is dead…, the widow or widower owns the author’s entire termination interest unless there are any surviving children or grandchildren…in which case the widow or widower owns one-half of the author’s interest.” In short, the death of the photographer does not free up the work for unlimited use.

We need to know what is right and wrong when it comes to using photographs that were taken by other people, and that takes us to copyright law.

The duration of a copyright is also important and is specified by Title 17. The law has changed through the years, and that may affect you if you are working with old photographs. For photographs taken after 1978, a copyright lasts for 95 years after the publication date or, if the author was a corporation, for 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first.

 A Case History

When I first started my websites, Memories of “Hawaii Five-0  and Remembering Jack Lord I filled them with pictures. I thought I was on solid ground; after all, my friends and I had purchased the images on Ebay and other online sources, and we had our receipts to prove that we had. But, then, I began to notice that some sellers included statements in their listings to indicate that ownership rights did not convey with the pictures. I decided to find out what those statements meant.

My research let me know that I needed to get permission to use the photographs I was so freely posting. I decided to remove all photographs, unless I either had taken them, myself, or had the permission of their photographers. That left me with only one photograph of Jack Lord, the subject of Remembering Jack Lord.

That was unacceptable to me, but how was I going to obtain permission to use all the photographs I had removed? Of more than fifty photographs I had purchased, I knew the photographers’ names for only six. Two dozen pictures were issued by the networks to newspapers to advertise upcoming episodes of the two series in which Jack Lord starred, Stoney Burke (ABC-TV, 1962-1963) and Hawaii Five-0 (CBS/Paramount Television, 1968-1980). Two pictures illustrated the model car that Steve McGarrett drove in Hawaii Five-0. I had no idea where the rest of the pictures originated.

Seeking Permission

My first step was to contact the copyright owners of photographs. I contacted the networks that produced the two television series and asked for permission to use the photographs that I had purchased. ABC, which was purchased by Disney in 1995, did not respond to my attempt to contact them. CBS invited me to use screen captures from their website, but those proved to be from the 2010 remake of the series; they did not respond to my renewed request for permission to use pictures from the original series.

I contacted three government agencies, which had published photographs reflecting Jack’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of two of their programs. First, I asked to use a photograph a friend had donated. Jack was an honorary commodore in the Coast Guard Auxiliary, and the picture showed him promoting their volunteer boat examination program. The public affairs director’s initial response was that, as United States Government property, the picture never should have been sold on Ebay. After I explained that it, no doubt, had come from Jack’s 2007 online estate auction and the director looked into the matter, he granted me permission to use the photograph.

I asked the Veterans Administration and Tripler Army Medical Center for permission to use another donated photograph, which promoted their No Greater Love program for recovering veterans. My initial request to Tripler brought a response that the picture was Government property. The Veterans Administration did not reply to my query. When I received neither approval nor denial to my request, I asked if they had a picture that I could use. Neither responded.

I knew the names of two photographers, who had taken several of the pictures I had purchased. My attempts to contact them by various leads brought no responses.

The sponsor of Hawaii Five-0 gave me permission to use their photographs. Ford Motor Company gave me permission to use an advertisement for the 1968 Mercury Park Lane Brougham, the model that McGarrett drove in Seasons 1 through 7. Indulge me while I explain that the car was seen parked before a Ford Tri-Motor, the airplane (circa 1925) that moved aviation out of the bi-wing and canvass body era and into the transcontinental transport era. Receiving permission to use the advertisement on my website was a highlight of the entire permission search.

Having exhausted hope of acquiring permission to use the pictures I had purchased, I began writing other organizations that might have photographs of Jack Lord and asking if they had pictures they could share with me. I wrote the historical society in his hometown; the elementary, high school, and university he attended; the two playhouses where he studied acting; the Metropolitan Art Museum and the Honolulu Arts Council, which have some of his paintings; the New York Public Library; and the University of Southern California, where his papers are archived.

I heard back from only three:

- St. Benedict Joseph Labre Catholic Church sent three pictures of the elementary school and church Jack attended and apologized for not being able to send student or class pictures due to a fire that destroyed many of their records in the 1970s.

- The Actors Studio apologized for not being able to help but explained that all archival material was donated to a museum when their founder passed away

- The New York Public Library sent a link to a newspaper photo archives. The cost of purchasing pictures from the archives is prohibitive.

Sorting It All Out

Why were the networks and photographers so guarded with their photographs? After all, Stoney Burke aired fifty years ago, and Five-0 wasn’t far behind it. It made no sense at that point, yet I knew there was a logical explanation.

Copyright law states that, when an organization hires a photographer to take pictures, ownership in those pictures rests with the organization. That seems clear enough, except that, with the passage of time, it may not be known whether the photographer was hired to take pictures, by whom the photographer was hired, or whether the photographer was working independently.

Over the past decade, attitudes have changed. Photographers now feel that any picture they take belongs to them and claim that they were working independently and not as contract employees. Here is a true story to illustrate: A company hired a photographer to take pictures for use in its advertising campaign. Even though the company paid the photographer, he then demanded to be paid by the magazine carrying the ad for the use of his picture. Here, copyright law collides with contract law. As a result, no one quite knows where ownership of the pictures lies.

The photographers took the photos between forty and fifty years ago. Many of the photographers, like the subjects of their work, have passed away. Ownership of their work has passed to their heirs. Sometimes, the heirs are not as generous as the photographers – if they can be identified and located, at all.

Similarly, photographs change ownership. Even if you find the original owner, you have not necessarily found the current owner.

In the past, government documents were held to be in the public domain. One could quote from them or use photographs without obtaining permission or giving credit. That no longer is the case. Today, some are in the public domain, but others are not. The best policy is to check with the issuing agency to make sure the one you want to use is available.

Does this mean that old photographs are lost to the public forever? As the situation now stands, that is how things appear. Unless the photographers and their heirs and the organizations that hired them can reach a meeting of the minds, we may have no more than very expensive scrapbook material.

Where To Go From Here?

Our mission as webmasters is to acquire photographs that we can use legally and ethically. Here are two ideas to help you.

Help in Identifying Copyright Owners. Companies exist to help identify and locate copyright owners; however, their services are expensive—far more costly than many freelance writers and webmasters can afford to pay. A better option is to check with photographic trade groups. Member photographers sometimes register their works, which remain on file.

Some professional digital photographs bear invisible watermarks that can help to identify their photographers through a system developed by Digimarc. The system reads the watermarks and provides whatever data the camera recorded. Even pocket digital cameras create invisible watermarks. These watermarks can be read by a free graphics utility known as Irfranview.

Using Stock Photos. Several companies sell stock photos online. At one time, they offered photographs of actors, politicians, and other luminaries. As the courts began to apply copyright law to the Internet, however, those photographs disappeared. Still, those companies can be excellent sources of pictures of general subjects. I purchased the right to use a stunning photograph of the Metropolitan Art Museum, which acquired two of Jack’s works when he was only twenty years old. Here are a few things webmasters need to know about stock photos.

Terminology

The terms used for the rights conveyed for using stock photographs can be confusing. They do not always mean what their names imply.

- “Public Domain” is “the realm embracing property rights that belong to the community at large, are unprotected by copyright or patent, and are subject to appropriation by anyone.” As you conduct your search, you will notice that few photographs truly are in the public domain

-“Copyright-free Images” might sound like they are in the public domain, but they are not unless the duration of copyright has passed without being renewed.

- “Royalty-free Images” are those for which you do not have to pay a separate fee each time you use the image. You do, however, have to pay an up-front fee.

- “Free Graphics” may not cost money, but they do carry terms and conditions that stipulate how the images can be used. For example, some require you to give the photographer’s name. Some may allow you to use them only for non-commercial purposes.

Editorial versus Commercial Websites

Websites fall into one of two categories: editorial and commercial. Editorial websites “are non-commercial and related to events that are newsworthy or of public interest.” Commercial websites advertise goods and services and seek to generate revenue. The fees for using stock photos and the rights conveyed often vary depending on whether the website is editorial or commercial.

Be sure to do your research to make sure you don’t overstep bounds. According to Jennifer McKenzie, who works to enforce copyrights, the best policy is not to “use images you have no rights to without express permission, and read end-user license agreements carefully so you understand permissible use.”

Conclusion

It is very tempting to do as many do and grab pictures, use them, and never look back. The problem with that approach is that it goes against the principles of ethics; that is, it goes against both the law and society’s belief that taking without permission is stealing and, therefore, is wrong. My decision is to have permission to use any picture I post on my websites. I continue to work to identify photographers and artists who will let me use their pictures. Each time one says “yes,” I feel like I’ve just won the lottery. The effort’s all been made worthwhile.

Trolls in the Comment Sections

Some things really get under my skin – drivers that honk when they don’t have the right of way, passive aggressive behavior and, more than anything, angry trolling on Internet comment sections.

According to PCmag.com, trolling entails deliberately posting derogatory messages to bait readers into responding with equally aggressive remarks. Trolls (i.e., individuals who practice trolling) often write heated comments that contradict common knowledge or throw blanket insults at other readers.

It’s easy to recognize trolls. Instead of adding their opinions to this particular article, they might dramatically proclaim that anyone who finds issue with online commentary is trying to crush our freedom of speech. They might then sift through the article to find grammatical errors and repost them, declaring that I can barely write, let alone reason.

Trolls often make inflammatory attacks on subjects regarding religion, race, ideology, politics and other strongly polarizing topics of conversation. Whether they arrive with the intention of making someone mad or express angry beliefs to vent their frustrations, trolls demonstrate a complete disregard for commonplace courtesies. Because many websites do not scrub their comment sections, we expect to find trolls on most of them.

Depending on the popularity of the site, the topic involved and the degree of provocation, trolling can result in a few angry retorts or several dozen repetitive backlashes. In worst-case scenarios, it can turn a comment section into a torrent of angry statements that drown out thoughtful ideas and discourage serious posters from sharing their thoughts. Sometimes, it even forces sites to remove stories or discontinue discussions.

In July 2012, the entertainment review site RottenTomatoes.com had to temporarily shut down its comment section due to a barrage of hateful speech and threats prompted by a movie review. For hours, the staff at Rotten Tomatoes had to sort through comments to find and delete misogynistic and hateful speech, including death threats targeted at the film critic. The Dark Night Rises – the movie at the center of this debacle – was not even released to the public when the incident took place.

While threats or verbal assaults are inappropriate in any comment section, they are particularly alarming when found within the pages of high-profile newspapers. Sometimes inflaming, occasionally humorous, frequently jarring and always obnoxious, trolling is commonplace in the online comment sections of Pulitzer Prize winning newspapers such as The Huffington Post, Politico, Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal. Here are just a few comments reprinted from the comment section of a Politico article detailing the Democratic National Convention:

“Your team has nothing. If you think God or Israel is going to be the deciding factor in this election, you're just dumb.”

“Biggest take away, todays [sic] democrats have nothing to offer.”

“People like you make me sick…when you write those kind of comments we have to conclude you're writing them from a mental institution and you've checked out of reality.”

Another commenter, this one posting in response to an article in The Wall Street Journal,wrote:

“It's notable to see the paid Obama bots, spreading their disinformation, name calling, attempting to insult any factual conversation.”

Note the irony in the last statement.

Because website publishers are the first line of defense against trolls, they can hold posters to strict writing standards and stop trolling before it starts. In a perfect world, an equipped troll patrol would make it an ethical priority to maintain a harassment-free environment. In reality, obnoxious people can post on the same platforms as the rest of us, automatic screening tools are inadequate, and trolls can be an afterthought for busy employees.

There are several reasons why thorough comment screening may not be in the best interest of editors. For one, angry commenters—annoying as they are—can promote traffic. If trolling is overlooked, individuals with a penchant for posting have incentive to return to websites and post again. When they do, they may see more ads, run into subscription requirements, and pique the interest of other readers.

Editors may also be lenient with trolls due to time constraints. Employees are often in over their heads with the number of posts, especially when editing them is one of the many responsibilities they have. In the interest of time, overworked writers in understaffed offices may turn a blind eye to offensive remarks.

Most administrators do acknowledge that trolling is a problem. Popular websites often post serious-sounding statements that declare their dedication to keeping comments clean. On its regulations page, The Huffington Post maintains that it does not tolerate, “direct or indirect attacks, name-calling or insults, nor does it tolerate intentional attempts to derail, hijack, troll or bait others into an emotional response.”

But if you quickly browse through the newspaper’s comment sections, you will find numerous examples of off-topic trolling. Beneath an article about the iPhone 5’s unique unlock feature, a poster insightfully reflected:

“That's doesn't sound like an American freedom, it sounds more like communism. Americans only care about being free to own the biggest guns and pray to the biggest statues of Jesus.”

Some days, I think it is best to simply roll my eyes and ignore the attention-seeking trolls who write these comments. I imagine them to be a small but loud bunch with a giant chip on their shoulder.

But they may be more numbered, more diverse and, on occasion, more malevolent than they appear. Having their ideas printed online can also be empowering, possibly firing them up for outrageous public behaviors.

This lends itself to the question: Should readers feel obligated to address trolling when they see it? After all, by frequenting websites that ignore vitriolic or belligerent commentary, readers are sending the message that they do not take it seriously themselves.

Although publishers are primarily responsible for reigning in trolls, readers should genuinely consider speaking up when trolls get hateful. If editors are unresponsive to the “thumbs down” or “flag” functions, it falls on the reader to contact administrators about offensive, belittling or investigating commentary. If that means bringing out the soapbox, so be it.

Managers are more likely to take trolling seriously when they see that their readers will not tolerate it. The New York Times is just one of numerous established websites that have managed to reign in the trolling problem and keep posts relatively clean. The newspaper has been able to keep trolls to a minimum by limiting the number of comment sections and hiring several editors to screen article discussions.

Unfortunately, many websites are happy to attract any posters and cannot afford to pay for new editors. This forces online administrators to make difficult decisions regarding their monitoring strategies. Publishers must balance the ethical importance of providing respectful platforms while making sure their financial goals are met. Depending on their priorities and means, this balance may be hard to achieve. Ultimately, it is the executive and not the troll who leaves the final comment.

The Ethics of Getting it Wrong

Newspapers run corrections as a matter of course; while everyone endeavors to offer the most correct information, slip ups do happen. Most publications that have come from a print background before publishing online maintain some vestige of that system. The Guardian, for instance, maintains a list of corrections in its news section which seems to be updated every day.

But The Guardian is in the minority online. Even among publications with staff — not bloggers relying on their own abilities to keep up — few enough do anything to make their readers aware of corrections made to the publication. In a study looking how publications are managed, the Columbia Journalism Review found dramatic differences between print magazines and the websites associated with those same magazines: copy-editing and fact-checking is far less rigorous for online publications than the print publications they are directly related to.

The more concerning point, however, is what happens when an online publication finds an error after an article has been published. This data collected by the Columbia Journalism Review reflects established online publications with print counterparts, whose staff members theoretically have a higher level of training and commitment to maintaining a professional publication than an individual blogger. Forty-five percent of these established publications will correct factual errors by editing the article and updating it, with no indication that such a change has been made. While there is no hard data on how online-only publications, including blogs, handle this situation, in my own experience as a blogger, updating a blog post or article with no note of the error is the typical method of correcting a factual error.

This leads to a question: if publications do not acknowledge that a correction has been made, are they actually providing their readers with accurate information? Furthermore, do publications have an ethical obligation to bring corrections to the attention of their audience?

No one wants to announce to the world that they were wrong, particularly when writing or blogging is not their full time job. Many bloggers will delete a post entirely if there’s an argument about their opinions, let alone about the facts. It’s a poor option because readers following links to a post since deleted may wind up confused about the location of the missing post. In most cases, it’s possible to find copies of those posts elsewhere — if it hasn’t inspired such fervor that it’s been quoted heavily, the Internet Wayback Machine is likely to have stored a copy.

But it’s more clearly unethical than correcting an article without explicitly stating such action has been taken. Melissa Ford, who blogs under the pseudonym Lollipop Goldstein, argues vehemently against entirely deleting posts: “I don’t delete posts because I feel cheated when other people delete their posts once they are asked to own up to their words. Once you set your ideas out there and someone reads it, it becomes part of their story as well. Every reaction to an original blog post or video is just as valid and important as the original piece. And in that case, removing the original words becomes akin to stealing something away from your readers who were emotionally affected by your words.”

Going back to the Columbia Journalism Review’s numbers, another 43 percent of established online publications add notes to an article when making corrections, but don’t mention the correction elsewhere. Some bloggers will take the approach of adding comments to an existing post in order to provide corrections, rather than editing the body of the text. While this does offer an alternative to simply making a change and moving on, there is no guarantee that a reader will actually make it to all of the comments on a given article, if any. Some sites require a login or a click to open comments, adding another set of steps between the reader and the correction.

If a reader has already read the article, before a correction has been made, she may never know that the facts weren’t correct — few readers go back to an older article, especially online. Assuming such readers are regular visitors to the site, there are ways to put that information in front of them, including noting corrections in a visible place on the home page. But that requires a willingness to advertise that the publication has erred — or that at least one writer at the publication has.

Consider Gawker, the flagship blog of Gawker Media. The site maintains a category of posts labeled “corrections,” which is actually a collection of interesting corrections posted to other sites and publications — not corrections posted to Gawker. The site does edit posts to reflect corrections, republishing them with notes, such as the post “Obama Thinks Defense of Marriage Act Is a ‘Bad Idea’ (CORRECTED)”, a post which misinterpreted an analysis of a fundraiser attended by President Obama.

If the reader manages to catch the update, then he is fully informed. If not, Gawker will publish another post in ten minutes. This approach is reasonable and fulfills ethical expectations. We might consider going further to be in the interest of the reader and the publication, but the reality is that this approach is at least an improvement over publishing corrections the next day with no way to go back to the specific article in question and add an update. It is a clear improvement on print corrections.

There are not yet universal best practices in place for handling corrections online. Greg Brock, the editor responsible for corrections at the New York Times, oversaw a redesign of the publication’s online error page in 2011. Arguably one of the more accessible corrections pages for a major publication, it includes corrections from the last seven days and offers an easy way for readers to submit errors they find. The combination of that page, plus the New York Times’ practice of noting errors at the end of each article as they are corrected, represents one of the best approaches for handling corrections online. It takes a committed team to sustain such an approach, however; what seems like a small workload distributed among a larger team is overwhelming when handled by the same person who researches, writes, edits, updates and otherwise manages all of the content on their own website.

But best practices are needed, that take into account that not all online publications have resources to commit to making corrections, despite the ethical concerns that come with leaving inaccurate information in place. Creating those best practices is a job that every publisher must take on, because the only way that bloggers and other online publishers will know what approaches they can take to managing the corrections process is to see it modeled on other sites.

Sexism Online...and Offline

In Pakistan, Internet cyber-bullying and harassment of women is both endemic and largely unreported. In an article for IPS from 2010, reporter Zofeen Ebrahim recounts one horrific incident in which a 10th grader was drugged and gang raped. When her family reported the incident, the perpetrators posted a video of the assault on the Internet. Ebrahim also described a case in which a woman's co-workers Photoshopped her face onto a naked body, and posted the altered photo on the company's website. Humiliated, she resigned her job and her fiancée broke up with her. Her life was effectively destroyed.

Again, this is Pakistan — a country infamous in the US for its misogyny and mistreatment of women. As such, it's easy for us to see the online harassment these women experienced as continuous with, or emblematic of, their society. To a Western oSEbserver, online misogyny in Pakistan just seems like an extension, rather than a break with, what we see as ugly cultural norms.

Of course, the mote in the foreigner's eye is always easy to pick out. Closer to home, things get a little fuzzier. What exactly, after all, is the relationship between online harassment and offline sexism in oursociety? 

For example, take the recent incident which focused attention on the online aggregation site Reddit. Reddit has become (in)famous for a number of violently misogynistic forums or topical boards called subreddits. In one subreddit called "Jailbait," contributors posted pictures of underage girls. In another called "Creepshot," people posted pictures of women they had snapped surreptitiously on the street or in public. The moderator of these forums (and a contributor to Jailbait) was a Reddittor who called himself “Violentacrez”. Violentacrez was notorious — and lionized — for his promotion and curation of controversial content. Among the subreddits that Violentacrez created or moderated were "Chokeabitch," "Niggerjailbait" and "Misogyny."

In mid-October, Gawker's Adrian Chen revealed that Violentacrez' real-life identity was Michael Brutsch, an employee at a financial services company. Brutsch was fired from his job at that company  almost immediately — an outcome that seems to suggest that online sexism is, in fact, not accepted in American society. Sexualizing underage girls and glorifying street harassment may be provisionally acceptable on Reddit (though both Jailbait and Creepshot have since been banned). But it's not acceptable under any circumstances in the real world. From this perspective, online sexism should be seen as onlinesexism. It's the digital world that's the major problem, not the real one — which is why Violentacrez was defanged as soon as he was revealed to be Michael Brutsch.

There's some evidence to support this viewpoint, according to Alice E. Marwick, an assistant professor at Fordham University who does research in Internet studies and new media theory. In a phone interview, Marwick said that many researchers believe that there may be "something about the online environment which creates a sense of disinhibition." The term "disinhibition effect" was coined by psychologist John Suler, and suggests, that people are more likely to be angry, vulnerable or outrageous — or, in this context, sexist — than they would be offline. In part, this may be because people have a sense of interiority or feel that the conversation is happening inside their own heads when they are looking at a screen, and so feel less socially restricted. Marwick emphasized that the disinhibition effect is a hypothesis rather than a conclusion, but said that she finds it persuasive as an explanation for at least some of the virulently sexist speech found online.

Marwick, though, also suggested another hypothesis. "There is a new type of acceptable misogyny," she said, "… a cultural shift…that is coming from a variety of social and economic forces and is reinforced by a lot of popular culture." Marwick argued that there is some evidence that pornography for men has become more violent and more obsessed with humiliation and dominance in the past decade. If this is the case, Violentacrez and Reddit could be seen not as a cultural aberration caused by the Web, but rather as a manifestation on the Web of a broader cultural move towards more egregious, self-conscious and even militant forms of misogyny.

It's not clear to me that you really need to posit more egregious or militant forms, though. Surely plain, old, trusty misogyny could account for Violentacrez without any particular cultural shifting needed. Emma M. Wooley, for example, in a recent Tumblr post, described the constant harassment she experienced as a teen girl.

The violations started small. I was 12, fairly tall with brand new boobs. My mother wouldn’t let me buy “real bras” for a long time. It didn’t occur to me that was weird until boys in my class started advising me to “stop wearing sports bras” because I was looking a little “saggy.”

It was a boy who told me I had to start shaving my legs if I wanted anyone to ever like me. I said that wasn’t true. He laughed in my face and called me a dyke.

During our conversation, Marwick linked this essay to Reddit's Jailbait and Creepshot subreddits, and pointed out that both forums are evidence of:

a larger belief that men should have access to women's bodies, that women should look sexy, that they are sex objects, that men are entitled to their own sexual pleasure regardless of the woman involved. These notions are a total dehumanization and complete objectification — the woman becomes nothing but an object; her feelings are completely irrelevant. Unfortunately, that is an attitude that is somewhat prevalent...

 The recent death of bullied 15-year-old Canadian Amanda Todd seems to further buttress the argument that online harassment of women and girls is a continuation of offline harassment, rather than a sharp break with it. Shortly before she committed suicide, Todd uploaded a video to YouTube where she related a painful story on written cards of her extended abuse and harassment. When Todd was in the 7th grade, she flashed her breasts during an anonymous webchat. The man on the other end took a picture and then used the image to systematically blackmail and torture her, demanding she strip for him. When she refused, he sent the image to Todd's teachers, friends and acquaintances. Her real life schoolmates then took up the bullying, forcing her to switch schools — though the original harasser and the picture continued to follow her.

Todd's first suicide attempt, however, followed an apparently unrelated incident in which a school rival organized virtually her entire class to physically attack her. This, Marwick said, was consistent with her own research findings about the relative effect of online and offline bullying. "Kids," she said, "are generally more emotionally affected by things that happen face to face than by things that happen offline." Moreover, online and offline harassment, as with Todd, tend to be linked and continuous — and kids like Todd who are the most vulnerable online are also those who are most vulnerable offline. The Internet can certainly facilitate bullying, and may affect its form, but it's not the cause of harassment or misogyny in America or Canada anymore than it is in Pakistan. On the contrary, sexism and bullying would exist whether there was an Internet or not — and, for that matter, continue to take their most virulent forms offline.

It seems clear, then, that any effort to confront misogyny and harassment online needs to think about and confront misogyny and harassment offline. Since misogyny is a cultural rather than a solely technological problem, solutions that seek to regulate technology alone are unlikely to be effective. For example, bans on anonymity which target people like Violentacrez can also hurt women and other marginalized groups. Laws against sexting can end up treating and prosecuting children as child pornographers. Even in cases where laws might be helpful — as in restricting Creepshot-like posting of photos without the subjects' consent — enforcement remains difficult.

Ultimately, the best response to harassment online and offline remains those old feminist staples: education and consciousness-raising. Communities, both online and off, need to determine to treat women as human beings, with all that that entails. This is, in fact, what seems to have happened with Violentacrez. People at Reddit became disgusted with his actions. When Reddit refused to control or discipline him, community members revealed his name to the media.

It's also worth noting that in a world without the Internet, Amanda Todd would quite possibly have died with only a small number of people knowing her story. As it is, her video has been viewed millions of time, and has clearly raised awareness about the harassment and misogyny which teen girls face in our culture. The Internet can facilitate sexism, but it can also give women, and especially girls, an unprecedented ability to share their experiences and tell their stories. If the Internet is part of the world, then maybe it can change the world, and not just for the worse.

Is Reddit Ethical?

Back when the Internet required modems and AOL user names – around the same time Vanilla Ice was un-ironically cool and Bill was the most powerful Clinton -- message forums reigned as hubs for online communities, and sites like 4Chan drew active, enthusiastic memberships.

Predating social media, these communities reveled in fringe culture and relished the relative anonymity granted by handles obfuscating their real-life identities. The consensus among these chat rooms favored the idea of compartmentalizing one’s online avatar and real life identity into separate spheres.

Online communities are significantly more sophisticated now, but Reddit, the massively popular forum referred to as “the front page of the Internet” and recently privy to an exclusive, interactive interview with the President of the United States, still clings to several aspects of Web 1.0, eschewing cutting-edge web design in favor of a stripped-down forum setup reminiscent of much older websites.

And though the Website is owned by Advance Publications--also the owner of Conde Nast--Reddit hews close to its no-frills aesthetic and does not shy away from fostering sub-groups devoted to anti-authority, mayhem and darkness in many forms. Not exactly what you’d expect from a website technically in the same family as VanityFair.com.

Reddit hurtles towards the mainstream, despite its rough-hewn look and embrace of the fringe. It draws over 18 million unique users a month. It is often mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook, and users have played integral roles in breaking important news, including this past summer’s Colorado theater shootings. And it is at the center of a maelstrom capturing the attention of the New York Times and other major media outlets.

Unfortunately, Reddit is currently embroiled in a controversy exposing some problems with its underlying principles. Following proper “Reddiquette” is extremely important to the community, and this guideline presents a reasonable set of conditions for using the site and shows users what the community stands for: it allows the creation of “subreddits” ran on a mostly autonomous level by appointed moderators. These smaller forums are places where anything and everything is allowed as long as it is legal, which means things outside of the realm of accepted taste are fine insofar as they do not break laws.

This tolerant statute means people can discuss rape, incest and a number of provocative topics without worrying about being shut down, and Reddit cultivates a framework of understanding in which user avatars are not meant to lead back to personal information or the exposure of their offline identities.This edict stands in stark contrast to the way some other popular social media sites operate.

For instance, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr banned “Thinspiration” images, or images of extremely thin people used to spur extreme dieters onward, because they may negatively affect vulnerable people, despite the fact they are licit. Web users keen to preserve unfettered expression—even about potentially combustible topics—derided these content bans, as they are undeniably censorious. Reddit sought a different approach and maintained its devotion to allowing legal content of all kinds, including a purposefully vile subreddit called r/spacedicks, which specializes in deliberately repulsive and perverse content like photos of dead babies.

Eventually, though, even Reddit caved to some demands. Its leadership made the decision to ban its controversial subreddit “Jailbait” because, although the approved images on the thread were not illegal, the group’s raison d’etre was explicitly to sexualize underage girls, which legitimated the idea of child pornography and molestation.

Even after that group disbanded, other salacious communities cropped up, including one called “r/creepshots” which published what are known as “up skirt” images, which was not guided by the age of the subjects but rather by whether you could see up their skirts (many were still underage). Since these images did not feature nudity they were not subject to the Video Voyeurism Act of 2004 because the Act only outlawed nudity.

Websites like Jezebel drew attention to these subreddits, which were not indicative of the spirit of many other communities but which comprised a shockingly robust percentage of traffic hits for Reddit.

Reddit did not welcome the attention, and tensions between the Reddit community and Gawker Media, of which Jezebel is a part, boiled over into all-out warfare when Gawker reporter Adrian Chen published the identity of Michael Brutsch, one of Reddit’s most notorious moderators, who went by the handle “Violentacrez” on the website.

Violentacrez moderated the r/jailbait subreddit and helped grow the r/creepshots subreddit, while presiding over other unsavory corners of Reddit’s heterogeneous community. And though his behavior was looked at askance by many Reddit users, legion members of the community came out in full force to defend him from “doxing,” the term for revealing the personal identity of an Internet moniker. Chen’s decision to reveal Violentacrez's identity was seen as an attack on the right to anonymity of Reddit users, and moderators from numerous subreddits decided to ban Gawker links.

This is where the problem of Reddit’s ethics is made apparent. Instead of privileging the right to free speech over the desire to remain anonymous and thus not responsible for the speech users put forth, some of Reddit’s moderators and users besmirched the website’s mission by conflating the right to discuss and post distasteful but perfectly legal things with the right to do so under the veil of anonymity. This lack of distinction between publishing legal filth a la Larry Flynt and having the right to do so without being identified is the heart of the problem with the website’s mission.

Amid the turmoil, the CEO of Reddit contacted team members in a statement explicitly criticizing the actions of the moderators who chose to censor Gawker, the implicitly non-hierarchal structure makes it difficult to police the moderators without upending the site’s management scaffolding.

Anonymity is not a legal right when someone enters a public arena, and Reddit’s forums are not subject to the same privacy expectations as e-mails.Thoughan expectation of anonymity is woven into Reddit’s tenets, expecting the outside world will respect that ethos is naïve. Striking back at another website with a different set of ethical principles by censoring content showed Reddit moderators valued anonymity over free speech. The fragmented nature of the Reddit moderation system means there cannot be one cohesive interpretation of Reddit’s ideology, and the site is too sprawling and autonomous to ever operate strictly within its stated ideals. It’s simply not a cohesive community, but rather an assembly of disparate communities, and this means it cannot have a fully coherent ethos.

While the decision to grant moderators autonomous control over subreddits keeps with Reddit’s egalitarian, non-hierarchal principle, it also makes maintaining a unified front difficult—if not impossible. And the non-hierarchal structure means individuals can wield disproportionate control over the site’s public face if their particular subreddit gains popularity. This is what happened with Violentacrez when his brand of speech became a massively popular aspect of the website, and it is something that will likely continue to challenge Reddit as a community in the future, if the site decides to maintain its present moderation structure.

Anonymity is an ideal condition in Reddit’s ideology, and the fact that the site chose and continues to choose to censor Gawker, even after staking its claim of mainstream legitimacy by decrying SOPA and PIPA, indicates many prominent Reddit moderators privileges anonymity over freedom of speech.

Reddit’s model for digital citizenship separates actions taken online and taken outside of the annals of subreddits too severely, and it does not have an apparatus for bringing its plethora of communities under one ethical umbrella. Therefore, while Reddit espouses an ethos of free speech that is nothing if not admirable, the way ethics are practiced on the site reflect a reality far less idyllic and idealistic.

Fair Use Online

Fair use.

The phrase sounds so rational; however, it has caused a lot of irrational stress and complications regarding the online re-use of third-party content.

Boiled down to its basics, fair use, to a digital journalist, means that you are free to use samples and snippets of content from other sources if you are writing in an editorial fashion directly about that actual content (e.g., quoting from an incendiary op ed you don't agree with, and writing about it on your blog).

To make fair use even fairer for the folks whose content is being used, it's always a good idea to link directly to the original content being written about. That drives both traffic and revenue to the source, and gets you out of the sticky situation of appearing as if you are using their content for your own personal gain.

In the early days of the Internet, it was not uncommon for people to use the full text of someone else's content, but credit the source, and consider that fair. But because eyeballs mean dollars online, just because you prominently promote who wrote or created something doesn't mean you're treating their work fairly. For example, you can embed someone else’s You Tube video on your site, but the creator can track how many times his work is played on your site and receive ad revenue from that exposure.

It gets a little fuzzier when you are talking about fair use in terms of images. Photographers are often the victims of unfair online poaching because it is so easy to grab someone else's image and use it to illustrate your article or blog post without contacting, crediting or paying the original artist.

Many people think it's okay to use someone else's image if your story includes a link to the original story in which it is used, but doing so is a slippery slope and often amounts to nothing more than ethical sleight of hand in order to acquire the illustration for free. In order to be as fair as possible, if you're not writing about the actual photo itself, which arguably would then be fair use, then the practice should be avoided.

The same holds true for video clips. If you're writing a news story about a specific piece of video, it's fair to use a clip to illustrate your point. However, fair use can sometimes come with consequences because if a movie studio with a deep pocket finds you airing a clip of their film, even if it is being used in an entirely editorial context, it’s possible to receive a cease and desist order or end up in legal trouble, which oftentimes isn't cheap.

But what about sites that employ fair use via aggregation as a business strategy? It's a very common practice these days, and an excellent example can be found at The Daily Beast’s website.

In fact, that site's motto, "Read This Skip That," highlights their content aggregation strategy. In the center of their home page is a feature they call "Cheat Sheet, Must Reads from All Over" that compiles the 10 stories they think are the Internet's top draws.

From their home page, The Daily Beast's Cheat Sheet headlines link to an interior page that summarizes the story and then links to the full feature on the third party site. At a time when so many people have so little time to read a substantial piece of journalism, these summaries can actually be a disincentive for someone to click on the link to the actual feature.

The Daily Beast gets between 2 and 3 million unique viewers each month according to Compete.com, and they have a solid journalistic reputation, so you probably won't hear a lot of complaining from the media outlets featured in their Cheat Sheet. Still, summarizing a story just enough to cover all of the pertinent facts feels more like a digital Cliff's Notes service for busy news and culture surfers than simple fair use.

When it comes to images, however, The Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet is picture perfect. They do not "borrow" images from the stories they are linking to, but instead,publish and properly credit the images that they chose, and—one would assume—pay for the rights to use those images.

So, in the end, is fair use fair? It depends on whom you ask. Blatant copying of content is easy to spot and prevent. Careful and calculated summarizing and linking is a lot harder to make a judgment about.

Fair use and aggregation are two very pivotal forces driving digital content strategies these days, and they are not going away any time soon. However, I can see a time when the practice could get a lot more complicated and make a lot of people much more careful about what they clip.

When—not if—a major news organization comes out with a breaking investigative story that the Daily Beast and all of the other big-time players in the fair use aggregation space feature, and it turns out to be wrong, how fair is fair use then? Do the sites that use and promote content from other sites for their own financial gain have any responsibility to make sure what they are promoting is accurate? It's almost certainly a question they are going to have to answer soon, and the answer they get may fundamentally change how online content is promoted between different sites.

Plagiarism Made Easy In The Digital World

Plagiarism is larceny, a writer's theft of someone else's words and claiming them as his or her own, along with the facts, thoughts and ideas they convey. In this digital age, stealing words is simply a matter of clicking a mouse, and presto! Huge blocks of verbiage may be copied and pasted into anything a larcenous writer may be writing.

With the World Wide Web an open territory for predatory plagiarists, the practice is now more widespread than ever before. Major appropriators of other people's writing include bloggers, students, college applicants and researchers publishing in respected medical and technological journals—all of whom have taken the words of others and passed them off as their own.

Even high-profile professional journalists, newspaper columnists and best-selling authors have been accused of plagiarism; we emphasize the word accused, rather than convicted.

Among big name writers recently charged with plagiarism is Time magazine columnist and CNN broadcast pundit Fareed Zakaria. He also had a stand-alone column in The Washington Post.

Zakaria was temporarily suspended from these positions, pending an investigation and an explanation after he acknowledged that he used the words of another writer in a column he wrote. Zakaria characterized his plagiarism as a "terrible mistake...a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault."

The source of Zakaria's purloined words was an article written in the New Yorker by historian Jill Lepore on gun control laws. Although Zakaria changed a few words in his plagiarized passages, the language was almost identical. Cam Edwards of NRANewss.com first discovered the plagiarism.

Time's reaction was swift and emphatic. A spokesperson for the publication said: "TIME takes any accusation of plagiarism by any of our journalists very seriously, and we will carefully examine the facts before saying anything else on the matter."

Equally as severe regarding Zakaria's plagiarism was the statement from the editorial page director of The Washington Post, Fred Hiatt. He said "Fareed Zakaria is a valued contributor. We've never had any reason to doubt the integrity of his work for us. Given his acknowledgement today [his admission of plagiarism], we intend to review his work with him."

Time suspended Zakaria, saying in a statement:

"Time accepts Fareed's apology, but what he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original; their views must not only be their own but their words as well. As a result, we are suspending Fareed's column for a month, pending further review."

Despite his admission of guilt, Zakaria has resumed writing for Time and is currently back at CNN.

Another case of plagiarism, this one accidental or inadvertent, according to the author, involves best-selling historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Long plagiarized passages appeared in Goodwin’s book, "The Fitzgerald and the Kennedys," published in 1987.

Goodwin said she accidentally confused her own notes with notes that she took from other printed sources. In subsequent editions of the book, attribution is given to the outside sources.

Goodwin is also the author of "Lincoln: A Team of Rivals," a book that forms the basis of Steven Spielberg's highly successful recent film, "Lincoln." Her previous plagiarism, accidental as she claimed, apparently has not diminished her popularity with readers or movie-goers.

In 1998, veteran newspaper columnist Mike Barnicle resigned from his job at the Boston Globe after 25 years when accusations of plagiarism were leveled against him. Two of his columns were questioned, one of which allegedly ran George Carlin jokes without attribution.

Barnicle's editor reinstated the columnist after other journalists and readers of the Globe clamored for his rehiring. Barnicle admitted he might have been "sloppy and lazy" in writing the columns in question, but denied that he was a plagiarist. Barnicle's punishmentwas a two-month suspension without pay. The Barnicle case is mentioned because it attracted national attention.

Despite these earlier professional problems, today Barnicle is a regular contributor to MSNBC's “Morning Joe” program, and writes for Time, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Esquire and many other print and online publications, according to Barnicle's Website.

What each of the above cases illustrates is that plagiarism, deliberate or accidental, is a common occurrence, even involving high-profile publications. The cases further illustrate that often the penalties for plagiarism are either moderate or almost non-existent.

But not every use by one author of another author's words constitutes a case of plagiarism. Authors may quote one another under provisions of the copyright law called fair use. Proper attribution of the borrowed quotes must be made, and a limited amount of words may be used.

Extensive "borrowing" of another author's words, however, could be construed as copyright infringement and actionable in a court of law, with monetary and compensatory damages assessed against the offender.

As plagiarism is made easier in the digital world, how can editors guard against it beyond trusting in the integrity and professionalism of the writers who write for them?

There are several plagiarism detectors available online. These software applications scan the targeted piece of writing for indications of plagiarism and flag the questionable material.

In a typical application process, the document to be scanned is uploaded into the plagiarism detector's system. The detector then searches through the Internet in books, periodicals, other print sources, comparing the target document with the acquired documents. Results of the scan are then submitted to the client who made the request for a plagiarism search.

Because plagiarism occurs with relative frequency in college-level papers, academic and scholarly writing, detectors have been increasingly used to ferret out cheaters in these areas.

Plagiarism may not seem to be much of a problem to some observers and they may think that it does not warrant punishment. Those who do should consider this: Students who steal words for their college admission essays have committed a crime against truth, and a crime against the institution of higher learning which is considering their admission.

Plagiarizing scholars similarly commit a crime against truth, and in cases where practical matters apply, they may also be hurting the reputations of the institutions for which they write.

Policing Cyberbullies One Law at a Time

This October marked the sixth annual National Bullying Prevention month. Facebook, CNN, Yahoo! Kids and hundreds of schools and organizations joined forces to raise awareness and inspire new bullying prevention measures. Ten years ago, a bullying prevention campaign would have focused almost exclusively on teasing, physical abuse and social isolation inside the classroom. But now, no such campaign would be complete without discussing an increasingly widespread from of harassment – cyberbullying.

The Cyberbullying Research Center defines cyberbullying as, “willful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones and other electronic devices.” Although the term is often used interchangeably with cyberstalking and cyberharassment, cyberbullying typically refers to digital harassment and bullying among minors within a school context. Among other things, this includes sending out threatening emails and instant messages, forwarding inappropriate photos and tricking students into revealing personal information to humiliate them on social media websites.

Legislators have taken some steps to protect victims of cyberbullying, but existing laws are neither standardized nor clear enough to curb cyberbullying nationwide. State digital harassment and stalking laws have been successfully used to punish offenders in numerous cases of cyberbullying, but they are only part of the solution. Cyberbullying is not a one-size-fits-all behavior, and overt threats associated with online harassment are sometimes, but not always, applicable to cyberbullying. Cyberbullies do not need to threaten students to damage their relationships with classmates and make their lives miserable in and outside of the classroom.

Because parents and teachers are often unaware of their role in preventing cyberbullying, they may miss the chance to stop it before it gets out of hand. If a teacher sees a student teasing a classmate in the hallways, she can send him or her to detention. If the incident includes physical violence or threats, the student may be suspended, expelled or reported to the authorities. But if the teacher finds out that a student is bullied on Facebook, can she still intervene? Unfortunately, the answer is an unclear “it depends.”

Currently, there is no national law that regulates cyberbullying or provides a uniform definition and protocol for schools to follow. A federal proposal created to protect victims of cyberbullying was submitted to Congress in 2008, but it raised concern over its potential interference with the First Amendment. Known as the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, the document called for a fine or imprisonment term of up to two years for individuals who used electronic means to initiate severe and repeated electronic communication that was, “intended to coerce, intimidate, harass or cause substantial emotional distress.”

The Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act was written in the aftermath of the highly publicized cyberbullying case of Megan Meier, a teenage girl who committed suicide after being cyberbullied by her friend’s 49-year-old mother. After Megan and her friend had a falling out, the girl’s mother created a fake MySpace profile, and posed as a flirtatious young boy to gain Megan’s trust. Once Megan bonded with the boy, she began receiving hostile instant messages from him. At one point, the boy even told her that the world would be a better place without her. Shortly thereafter, 13-year-old Megan took her life.

Although the story tugged at the nation’s heartstrings and resulted in an outpour of public support for the family, the accompanying act was criticized for its vagueness. Without a clear definition of cyberbullying, some legislators feared that it could be used to silence Internet users who did not have a good understanding of their First Amendment rights.

Due to federal discord over cyberbullying legislation, it is currently up to states to create laws that are standardized, clear and not in conflict with the freedom of speech. Across the nation, states are experiencing difficulties as they take on this complicated task, but progress is being made.

As of July 2012, 49 states have anti-bullying laws (Montana being the exception), and 47 of them address electronic harassment. All of these states also call for schools to create policies that deal with student bullying and digital harassment. The extent to which the laws also address off-campus and non-physical cyberbullying varies from state to state.

The Alabama Student Harassment Prevention Act, for example, requires public schools to create policies that protect students from electronic and non-electronic harassment, violence and threats. These policies are directed at behaviors that occur on school property, buses or at school-sponsored functions. Because such policies focus on threatening school behaviors, they may leave educators wondering how they can intervene in cases of offsite cyberbullying. Furthermore, it is unclear whether emotionally threatening behaviors such as repeated attempts to embarrass or damage a student’s reputation online fall under the state’s definition of bullying.

The Illinois bullying law is more direct, but still fails to clarify unacceptable behaviors. State legislation prohibits cyberbullying in emails, text messages or social media websites, and it requires both public and private schools to present information about Internet safety at least once per year in grades 3 through 12. It also gives school administrators the right to suspend or expel students who use the Internet to explicitly threaten other students or school employees on websites that are accessible within the school or to third parties who work or study at the school.

The Chicago Board of Education (CBE) clarifies most of the issues not covered in the Illinois state bullying law. According to the CBE student code of conduct, schools must inform the police when a Chicago public school student uses a computer or cell phone to, “stalk, harass, bully or otherwise intimidate” a student on or off campus. The CBE further defines bullying by listing behaviors that include, but are not limited to, “harassment, threats, intimidation, stalking, physical violence, sexual harassment, sexual violence, theft, public humiliation, destruction of property or retaliation for asserting or alleging an act of bullying.”

Due to variations in state laws, anti-bullying programs play a central role in educating students, teachers and parents about digital harassment. Oftentimes, schools partner with outside organizations to create clear policies and explain how cyberbullying cases should be handled.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a civil rights and human relations agency that serves as a resource for the government, media, law enforcement and educators, is one of many organizations that helps schools recognize and respond to digital harassment. The League instructs teachers by hosting interactive cyberbullying workshops to explain how they can protect their students.

I contacted Jennifer Nielson, Associate Director of the ADL, to find out what top-down measures should be taken to end cyberbullying. According to Ms. Nielson, combining prevention policies and prevention education efforts is the best way to curb the problem. Based on the ADL model Cyberbullying Prevention Law, an effective state policy meets the following criteria:

• It contains a strong definition of bullying (including cyberbullying).
• It addresses bullying motivated by race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other personal characteristics.
• It includes notice requirements for students and parents.
• It sets out clear reporting procedures.
• It requires regular cyberbullying recognition and response training for teachers and students.

These and other components have already been incorporated into many state anti-bullying laws, but not all of them are equally comprehensive. As states continue to create and amend their legislation, politicians should keep in mind the importance of creating clear and standardized laws to give students, parents, and educators across the nation a wealth of applicable resources.

For the 25 percent of students who admit to being bullied repeatedly through text messages or the Internet, cyberbullying is not just another news story. Electronic bullying can spin out of control within minutes, but it can leave behind years of psychological damage. Digital technology has given cyberbullies the power to harass students on various platforms, but inch by inch, legislators are working to reclaim that power.

Wired Shut by Tarleton Gillespie

Wired Shut: Copyright and the shape of digital culture by Tarleton Gillespie The MIT Press | 2007

Wired Shut paints a picture on how the role of copyright law has drastically changed in regards to technology and therefore how it has started to greatly affect online culture. After an introduction to the topic, the book briefly summarizes copyright law and the changes it has undertook through the last few centuries, up to the development and implementation of DRM. Gillespie articulates where previous attempts at regulating digital media was discussed by the industry and failed, how the DCMA and DRM has changed access privileges for the online community, and future implications of continued encryption practices within digital culture. The question of how all of these changes affect fair use is a reoccurring theme within the book.

There is benefit to reading the book for both new comers to copyright law and for those with advanced knowledge. Gillespie translates the complexity of copyright law by using analogies from how other types of laws have affect behaviors in order to help the reader understand the sociology of law. He then gives a brief history of the conversations and reasoning that led to current copyright laws. Gillespie then explains that there are gray areas to every law and points out examples where the DRM and DCMA conflict with the fair use portion of copyright law. By the fourth chapter, when the author gets deep into the history of the conflict between copyright law and digital culture behavior, new comers to the topic should be prepared to tackle the complexity of the topic. Readers with more experience with copyright law will benefit more from later chapters.

The book ends with roughly 100 pages of notes, citations and references. This indicates not only the amount of research the author conducted but also provides a reader with interest in the subject places for further research.

http://www.wiredshut.org/

Headline hype hurts in keyword crazed digital age

During the 1990s, I was a frequent contributor at the Village Voice. It was a great paper to write for, not only because they accepted really offbeat pitches, but also because editors encouraged you to write with style, wit and an edge, especially when it came to suggesting headlines for pieces.

My favorite headline that I suggested for one of my features was for a story I wrote on the national quadriplegic deer hunting championships. (Did I mention that the Voice accepted really offbeat pitches?) It involved spending the day in the deep woods with a group of wheelchair-bound deer hunters who positioned and fired their high-powered rifles using sophisticated sip and puff controls manipulated with their mouths.

My suggestion for a headline was "Head Hunters." (Yes, I agree it was crass, politically incorrect and even a bit mean, which is probably why the Voice went with "Special Hunters.")

I wrote that story more than a decade ago. But if I wrote it today, this is what my suggestion for a headline would be: "Disabled hunters gather for national championships."

Why such a different take on the title? Have I mellowed and matured with age?

Not necessarily. I would change the headline so drastically because when this story went online (where most people would read it)  no one searching for anything on the topic of quadriplegic deer hunters would ever find the story with my initial headline suggestion.

Why? Because of the three most hated and misunderstood words in digital journalism: Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is daunting and scary to many journalists, but the concept is fairly simple. Basically, SEO means clearly placing certain key terms in a headline and in the body of an article so that an article can be easily found when someone does an online search for the topic of the article.

The process got a bad rap because lots of editors started putting SEO ahead of substance. Many folks made lots of money gaming the system by optimizing advertising-supported pages for highly searched terms that offered little in the way of quality information. Search engines like Google have caught on to the practice, and their algorithm updates consistently stress editorial quality over merely SEO skills.

Still, even with those modifications, many journalists continue to refuse to embrace SEO. Why? They feel that it's unnatural, unethical, contrived and stifles creativity. According to a post on seosunite.com, Google “turned people into automated SEO robots with blinders on! people are scared to do anything ‘radical.’”

Do journalists have a point? Mostly not, and this is coming from someone who vigorously eschewed using SEO tactics for years as a writer and an editor.

Journalists with an anti-SEO stance are off the mark when it comes to SEO because using optimization is actually good for journalism consumers. Yes, SEO hampers the writer’s ability to write zippy headlines that make clever allusions but those are often written for the newsroom's benefit anyway. Just look at the stories on the cover of the New York Times for the last 25 years and you'll see that the world's putative paper of record has essentially always used keyword-rich SEO best practices for its print headlines because that's the best way to get across the main point of the story to the reader.

There is, however, a dirty little secret when it comes to SEO and headlines, but it's a bit technical. Most newspaper and magazine web sites use content management systems – software programs that allow them to edit and create articles -- to publish material online. In many of those systems, the headline of the story is also the page's title tag, which is the most important aspect of search optimization. The title tag is the phrase that appears at the top of your web browser window and is the element that search bots pay the most attention to when categorizing your page.

But title tags and headlines don’t have to match. Increasingly, content management systems and SEO experts are divorcing the title tag from an article's headline, giving writers more creative freedom when it comes to writing headlines.

That means that an editor or writer would need to do a keyword search and use that information to write a solid title tag so that people searching on the subject could easily find the information. Then, a snappy headline could be written to accompany the feature, itself.

Problem solved, but only if journalists are smart enough to know something about content management systems and diligent enough to write two types of headlines for each story they publish online.

What's Not In A Name: The Ethics of Cybersquatting

True story.

A good friend of mine was planning a baby shower and sent out a very nice Evite for the occasion. In the invitation, she included a note that the mom-to-be was registered at Giggles.com and encouraged the guests to visit the site and choose gifts from her registry.

That all sounds great, right?

But there was a slight problem. Giggles.com is a site that sells items meant to "enhance your love life."

Where she should have directed people in the invite was to Giggle .com, whose tagline is, "healthy. happy. baby."

Once the embarrassing, and quite funny, error was spotted, an updated invitation was quickly dispatched, the baby shower went off without a hitch and appropriate gifts were purchased by all.

While all was well in that case of the mistaken baby shower present URL, ethical issues have swirled around the use of and creation of internet addresses since the start of the web's global popularity.

Some of these kinds of issues are well known. The most common is called "cybersquatting," which essentially refers to people who go out and buy domain names not to use them, but to sell them back to companies who need them.

This issue was actually addressed by the federal government in 1999 by the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. According to an article on Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society's web site, the Act gave the owners of trademarks "a cause of action against anyone who, with a bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of another's trademark, registers, traffics in, or uses a domain name that is identical to, or confusingly similar to a distinctive mark, or dilutive of a famous mark, without regard to the goods or services of the parties."

That certainly helped tamp down the practice, but it didn't eliminate it. Even with that legislation enacted, the United States government could not wrest control of WhiteHouse.com or WhiteHouse.org, and iconic rocker Bruce Springsteen could not get back the rights to his namesake web address.

And then there is the even murkier tactic of "typosquatting" -- buying slightly misspelled URLs of highly trafficked sites and using the siphoned traffic for less than ethical purposes. Sophos, an online data security company, recently investigated the practice, and what they found was quite disturbing. According to a Dec. 2011 article about the Sophos findings on the SecurityAsia website, "The study revealed that there is a significant typosquatting ecosystem around high-profile, often-typed domain names. A huge 86% of the possible one letter misspellings of the Apple homepage led to typosquatting sites."

But is typosquatting illegal? Yes, and it is covered in the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. However, according to a Nov. 2011 article in Business Week, "Companies can defend against attacks by registering any available typo domains themselves or by taking legal action, but tracking down the owners of typo domains is difficult and time-consuming."

However, when it comes to questionable domain name hijinks, the sketchiest and slickest is 100% legal -- the .org suffix. Most people get a warm and fuzzy feeling when they visit a .org web site, knowing they are supporting a non-profit organization whose efforts are designed to help the common good. If only that were actually true.

In reality, the .org designation means next to nothing, and anyone can append it to any kind of site. What's the most well known example? Craigslist.org. Not only is that site not the altruistic non-profit many people think it is, but according to an analysis done by NakedApartments.com, Craigslist could have made almost $15 million from brokers' apartment listings in 2011 in  New York City  alone.

For more than nine years, the .org designation has been managed by the Public Interest Registry, which, actually, is a non-profit. But when you go to their site to get some insight and context on the hows and whys of using a .org, what you find is pretty amorphous.

PIR has built an entire site designed to market the use of .orgs. The site is http://whyichose.org/, and its tagline is, "WHEN WHAT YOU DO MATTERS." (So other kinds of sites are for people who do things that don't matter?) In the "About" section of that site, PIR explains the following: "As one of the original domains, .ORG has been shaped by the global community as the place to express ideas, knowledge, and causes on the Internet. Whether an individual with an idea to share, a small club organizing and motivating your members, or a large company conducting educational and marketing campaigns - the .ORG domain name communicates trust, credibility, and community interest."

That certainly sounds good, but if any person with any kind of site can run a .org, what does it really mean and what can consumers assume when they visit a .org site? In short, nothing.

It all boils down to a kind of marketing wish fulfillment -- if you build a .org, good people will come. But if internet users knew that such sites don't necessarily represent the kinds of values and efforts they thought they did, would they feel the same way, and would so many visit?

What's the solution? Create a category truly just for non-profits, not unlike the government's .gov or the military's .mil. That kind of designation would go a long way in clarifying for consumers exactly what they can expect when they type in a URL. And dealing with the issue now is more crucial than ever, given the fact that Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the group that has control over top-level domains, is about to exponentially expand their number to include things like .beer and .pizza. Those kinds of new web addresses will help a lot of businesses stand out online, and nonprofits deserve the same kind of specificity.

The Ethics of Crowdsourcing

The word "crowdsourcing" was first used in 2006 by writer Jeff Howe in an article he contributed to Wired. As Wikipedia haughtily explains, the term "is a portmanteau of 'crowd' and 'outsourcing.'"

But just what does that mean?

Wikipedia itself is possibly the most popular example of crowdsourcing . The concept of crowdsourcing involves organizing scores of people who are connected digitally to tackle a task. In Wikipedia’s case, the group creates an online encyclopedia. And while this may sound like a recipe for informational sloppy seconds, in 2005, the journal Nature compared articles about scientific topics published on Wikipedia to those found in the Encyclopedia Britannica. According to a BBC News article,  they "found few differences in accuracy."

Accuracy notwithstanding, one benefit a leather-bound volume of an encyclopedia does have over an online digital entry is its inherent immutability. Not so for Wikipedia. The digital pages of well-known politicians like Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi have been maliciously changed by their critics. And recently, a journalist was the victim of creative revisionism when his Wikipedia page was attacked in retaliation for something he wrote.

Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi reveled in the death of conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart on a blog post nastily titled "Death of a Douche," writing, "So Andrew Breitbart is dead. Here’s what I have to say to that, and I’m sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction: Good! Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead." Soon after he had spewed out that bile, Taibbi's personal description on his Wikipedia page was amended to, “an American author and piece of excrement.” It was a literal war of words, as well as quite a chilling warning to any writer with the chutzpah to aggressively critique a subject.

On the upside, the rise of crowdsouring has been a real boon for aspiring journalists and photojournalists,. There are a number of sites on the web,, like Elance and oDesk for writers and iStock for photographers, that have substantially lowered the bar for entry into the journalism market. They give many more people than ever before an opportunity to develop their skills and produce a professional body of work. On the downside, the work they get isn't usually very glamorous, and the pay is typically meager.

While opening up the profession to more minds has been seen by some as a positive development linked to crowdsourcing, not all of the movement's results are commendable. One element of crowdsourcing that has major negative ethical implications is the use of video and images posted on social media sites by major news organizations.

For example, on the May 14 edition of NBC Nightly News, the program broadcast a story about the civil unrest currently happening in Syria. During the segment, NBC ran what they described as "amateur footage posted online which we couldn't independently verify showing burned out tanks in the aftermath of the attack." That would be like the New York Times writing that they knowingly published an article with unverified information they were told by a single source. In the legal world, it's called hearsay, and there's a reason it can't be used in court. However, running that kind of unchecked footage is a heck of a lot easier, and much less expensive, than hiring journalists to actually be on the ground covering a conflict.

A similar, and equally disturbing practice centered on crowdsourcing occurs when news organizations solicit help from their readers to mine large batches of information for scoops. The idea has a lot to do with the vital importance of speed to market of a brand's information in the digital world. If you aren't the first outlet to publish important breaking news, that can seriously impact your ability to show up in search engines, which is now a primary driver in how news is delivered and consumed. The dynamic is a recipe for shallow, skim-the-surface stories.

An excellent example of this occurred last June when a huge cache of Sarah Palin's emails from her time as governor of Alaska were released. An article on the Knight Digital Media Center 's site explained how the New York Times' handled the situation:

When 24,000 Sarah Palin emails are released this afternoon at 1 p.m. Eastern, news organizations will not only have teams of reporters sifting them for news and database specialists posting them online - outlets like the New York Times also hope for the help of hordes of readers to scour the massive data source.

The Times is asking its users to help “identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight.” No form has yet been posted on its web site, but the news outlet said it would be a simple one to allow readers to describe the nature of the email and then to share their own name and email addresses so they can get credit for their findings.

Could either a Palin supporter or detractor have wanted to participate in this crowdsourcing process in order to skew the Times' coverage in their ideological direction? Of course not. And why would the Times want to hire and pay enough qualified reporters and editors to do it themselves when they can compensate a horde of unqualified amateurs with their name in print?

It would be wrong to say that crowdsourcing has not been a partially beneficial new practice in digital journalism, especially when it comes to widening the funnel and allowing more voices to participate in the profession. However, crowdsourcing also has substantial downsides, most disturbing of which is its ability to help news organizations cut corners, which can be incredibly tempting in an age when if you don't publish first, you're basically dead last.

How do you know who is blogging?

Hello, open-minded readers. My name is Karen Dybis. I am a freelance journalist in the Metro Detroit area who writes newspaper articles, magazine stories and blogs at night as my two children sleep one floor above me.

Fact or fiction? Luckily for you, the previous paragraph is true. The reality is I could be anyone living anywhere and writing just about anything. And I could be pretty convincing. I am a professional writer, after all.

The key to my identity may be the word “professional.” How I represent myself online matters to me. However, there are others in the wide-open world of journalism profession who have proven to be top-notch hucksters, finding an audience for what they purport to be journalism. And, as anyone who has ever listened to shock-jock radio knows, the public can be easily deceived.

Online hoaxes are hardly new, but there are some situations so ridiculous that they should become standard reading in journalism school. One such example is the story of a 40-year-old graduate student who was able to trick international media – think Fox News, CNN, Huffington Post, The Washington Post – and the thousands of loyal readers of “A Gay Girl in Damascus” into believing he was a young, lesbian Syrian woman named Amina Arraf.

What makes the deception by American Tom MacMaster, the then-medieval studies major at the University of Edinburgh, even more spectacular is how much media his blog received when he posted that Amina had been kidnapped. Little did McMaster know that when his character conveniently “disappeared,” the world would react quickly and strongly.

Meanwhile, the stunned world found out just days later that MacMaster was the mastermind of it all. Several devoted fans of the blog began digging into the story, discovered MacMaster’s ruse and exposed it through articles, their own blogs and television news programs. He had three armed men steal Amina away so he and his wife could have a few days of vacation.

The story was shocking when it first broke last June, and it is no less shocking now. The question now is what the media learned from the experience – and how easily could it be fooled again. Journalists and bloggers alike can learn from MacMaster’s failings are how necessary it is to take time to examine the author of a blog.

I admit that I took this particular case to heart as I delved into it for this essay. I have been a freelance writer for about six years, and I can honestly say that I have received jobs, handled interviews and completed monetary exchanges for publications entirely through email. Sometimes, there haven’t been any telephone calls or person-to-person conversations. I have worked with editors in places like Alaska and Boston. The only time I saw their faces was when I looked up their profiles on social media sites.

It is obscenely easy to be someone else online. Lots of people love to be anonymous “trolls” – the usually anonymous opinion mongers who torture journalists on websites. It is possible to track them down. I’ve done so myself. Thankfully, more legitimate web sites and online newspapers are changing their policies on how people must identify themselves when making comments on stories to require some transparency.

MacMaster, as many learned later, is an expert at avoiding personal contact with his readers, online commenters as well as interested journalists. As Danny O’Brien wrote in the Irish Times, “In the Amina case, absolutely no one had met Amina, and she wriggled out of any situation that might pin her down. She failed to turn up to press interviews in Damascus; she claimed Skype was not working for online phone calls; when a close online friend wanted to call her, she claimed she had to throw away her mobile for fear she was being tracked.”

But just how easy is it to fool people online? Out of curiosity, I created a completely false online persona. It took all of 10 minutes – and that’s not hyperbole. I chose my middle-school pseudonym, Kim Henley, as my new identity. After all, the lovely Ms. Henley under my direction had written a few letters to the editor of my local newspaper, The Detroit News, in her time, and I knew it would be easy for me to remember her name.

I started on LinkedIn and wrote a professional resume within minutes. I then linked that account to “her” new Twitter and Facebook. I quickly set up a Hotmail account and I was ready to roll. A few keystrokes later, I had my own website and a blog. Instant celebrity was mine to have with some creative writing and marketing. Within a few days, I also had my first request to connect on LinkedIn, a popular professional networking site.

Granted, I was being deceitful. But there are plenty of people who write under an assumed name. Why not start a racy blog? Why not apply for jobs? Why not post things that were inflammatory just to get a few kicks out of it? I care about what would happen when – not if – I was caught.

I spoke with several newspaper and blogging colleagues about the MacMaster case. Many were surprised to hear about it. The majority felt that what MacMaster did was outrageous and the blog should never have lasted as long as it did without the author’s identity being discovered by readers.

Desiree Cooper, a longtime writer and venerable columnist for The Detroit Free Press, said identity is somewhat flexible in cyberspace – mostly because she distrusts the information she finds there on a fundamental level.

“Since I was raised on old school journalism and worked in mainstream media for more than 15 years, I come to the web with a great deal of in-born skepticsm. The fact is that, unless a blog is hosted by a traditional medium, I assume that I'm reading something produced by a hobbyist or a promoter, not a journalist,” Cooper said “There are a few blogs that I sample (not many) and I only read them to find out what people are talking about. I see them as purely a way to ‘listen in.’”

Stepping away from traditional identities actually is one reason people enjoy being online, Cooper added.

“The Gay Girl in Damascus is an extreme example, but I’m not sure how truly rare it is for people to assume different identities online. Product promoters appear as ‘ordinary people.’ Men and women switch gender identities to explore and express themselves in new ways. People pose as ‘experts’ in order to sell their books/clothing/DVDs. It's just one more reason to always distrust whatever you read in blogs,” Cooper said.

After all, asked former Detroit-area reporter Anne Marie Gattari, who was making the phone call to find a male voice on the other side?

“This is craziness. And the worst part is the fake blogger and wife become media stars,” Gattari said. “If I'm going to use something in my blog or column that I’ve read on Internet, I confirm the writer’s credentials by checking out his or her website. I also will Google the writer to see if there have been news stories about him or her. If the person has any credentials at all, it’s not hard to find info on him or her."

Gattari said having at least one real, personal contact, even a simple telephone call, is better than conducting all of your exchanges online.

“I typically do not read blogs that are not attached to a legitimate news source,” said Gattari. “I'm not afraid to pick up the phone and call. No reporter or writer should use email only for interviews. It can lead to unauthentic sources being quoted. And besides, it’s lazy.”

Blogger and author Monica Marie Jones said she prefers to see her blog as an online journal, and not as a marketing technique like MacMaster and others see theirs.

“It reflects the thoughts, views, opinions and interests of the writer. If you want to write fiction, just write a book...or create a blog where you showcase your fictional work or a fictional character, but let your readers know that this is the case. I feel that it is just plain wrong to mislead people in that way,” Jones said.

Even my local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists touched on the issue a few months back. A young journalist asked if she could use Facebook posts in her stories. Several veteran reporters were adamantly against the practice, saying that for all you know, they could be a 16-year-old Russian kid with excellent English skills.

Da. I mean, yes. Yes, they could.

Seeing isn’t Believing: Photo Manipulation in the Digital Age

When Rich Lam went to bed early on the morning of June 16 last year, he had no reason to suspect he’d wake up to a media frenzy.

The night before, Lam was on assignment for Getty photographing riots in Vancouver after the city’s hockey team, the Canucks, lost the Stanley Cup to the Boston Bruins. According to Canadian news reports, several people were stabbed during the riots, cars were set on fire, stores were looted and police carrying shields moved in to control the crowd.

Lam had shot protests and riots before, so the dangerous environment was nothing new to him. At one point while Lam was standing behind a police line, he snapped a few frames of what he believed to be a man helping a woman who’d fallen in the street. The pair were about 30 to 50 yards away, so Lam zoomed in, making sure the woman’s legs were in focus. Then he “never looked at that photo again.”

Lam returned to his editors, who were on-site for the big game to assist with cropping photos and writing captions. “Another photographer told me, ‘Hey, nice picture of the couple kissing,’” Lam recalls. “I only saw it on the screen for about 30 seconds.”

The next day, that photo went viral. Questions about the kissing couple circulated around the globe as the photo was shared on Twitter and Facebook. News media searched for the couple’s identity. Bloggers started to question if the shot was staged or if the photo had been manipulated.

That’s when Lam’s phone started to ring with questions he didn’t have answers to. He hadn’t gotten the couple’s names because they were on the other side of the police line. And if the moment was staged, “I knew I wasn’t any part of it,” Lam says. At the request of his editors, Lam provided other photos from the kiss sequence to prove the moment wasn’t staged.

By June 17, the couple had come forward and an amateur videographer produced video from the scene that showed the photo was authentic. “I felt the weight of the world was off my shoulders,” Lam says.

But the doubts from bloggers were almost insulting. Lam had built a solid reputation as a photographer for the past 15 years. “I understand it’s their job to hear from the horse’s mouth if it was doctored,” Lam says of the journalists who questioned him. “No one could accept a good photo for just that — a good photo.”

So why is the public starting to see problems where there are none?

Part of the problem has to do with the existence of more savvy news consumers, who, ethicists and photojournalists say, have become more skeptical of news photos in recent years, as coverage of photo manipulation scandals becomes more frequent and prominent. Consumers also have seen for themselves what they themselves can do with relatively inexpensive and easy-to-use digital manipulation software like Photoshop.

“The credibility of the photojournalist that we once had as documenters of what’s happening in the world, it definitely takes a big hit when people start fooling around with it,” Lam says. “It’s that whole thing of one rotten apple spoils the bunch. Once you fool the reader... they’ll have that perception of ‘What’s stopping this person or that person from doing it?’”

But that skepticism isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“Your average citizens are learning about journalism and how it works and to not trust everything they see or read,” says Paul Martin Lester, a professor at California State University, Fullerton, who’s written extensively about evolving photojournalism ethics. “I would think you want to be skeptical of what you see. So it’s really a positive influence on the public’s state of mind.”

Lester notes that photo manipulation didn’t begin in 1990 with the release of Photoshop. In his book “Photojournalism an Ethical Approach,” Lester traces the first faked photo back to 1840 when a Frenchman posed as a corpse. Throughout photography’s early history there have been examples of photographers who made photo composites and passed them off as one moment in time, bodies of Civil War soldiers that were moved for dramatic effect and mash-ups done in the darkroom. For example, the popular full-length portrait of President Abraham Lincoln that appears on the $5 bill is actually Lincoln’s head atop a Southern politician’s body.

And in the early 20th century, staging a shot wasn’t considered as unethical as it is today. Lester uses Dorothea Lange’s famous “Migrant Mother” photo as an example. In it, the children were directed to turn away from the camera and part of a distracting hand holding the tent flap was airbrushed from the image.

This changed by the 1950s, Lester says, when academic institutions like the University of Missouri started offering photojournalism majors and professional organizations like the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) started to group photographers together, offering them guidance and making them think more like professionals. Eventually, codes of ethics for photographers were drafted and universities added ethics courses that became integral to photojournalism programs.

Since the 1950s, photojournalism codes of ethics have consistently stated that you cannot add or subtract from an image in a way that distorts reality, Lester says. The current NPPA code of conduct urges photographers to stay away from stage-managed photos and prohibits them from doing anything that deliberately alters the events unfolding before them. The editing process must “maintain the integrity of the photographic images' content and context.” Images shouldn’t be manipulated in a way that misleads viewers or misrepresents subjects.

The fundamental philosophy of photojournalism ethics might sound intuitive, but that’s because the problem has less to do with ethics than how they are put into practice, says Kevin Connor, president of Fourandsix, (a word play on “forensics”), a company that’s working to develop tools that analyze and authenticate digital images.

Many photojournalists say they stick to alterations in Photoshop that they could have done in the darkroom. But for journalists who were raised on digital cameras, that might be a difficult basis for judgement calls.

To solve this, some organizations provide specific limits on what can be done in Photoshop. For example, the Associated Press allows photographers to make “minor adjustments” such as cropping, dodging and burning, converting to grayscale, toning and color adjustments that “restore the authentic nature of the photograph.” Use of the cloning tool (which copies and pastes part of the picture) is only permitted to eliminate dust on camera sensors or scratches on scanned negatives. Removal of “red eye” is not allowed.

But there are no hard and fast rules as to which Photoshop tools are off limits.

“The challenge here is it is contextual,” says Connor, who worked at Adobe for 15 years, mostly on Photoshop products, and now blogs about photo editing. “Those same things that you do that are valid, if pushed too far can become inappropriate.”

One of the most famous examples of taking photo manipulation too far is Time’s 1994 cover of O.J. Simpson, which darkened Simpson’s mugshot in a way that made him look menacing. Lightening or darkening is not inherently wrong, Connor says, “but if you do it in a way that has a specific meaning or impacts in a sensitive way, that’s out of line.”

Most photo editors and contest judges know to look for certain clues that a photo has been doctored. According to a 2007 American Journalism Review article about photo manipulation, “the most common signs are differences in color or shadows, variations in graininess or pixilation, blurred images or elements in the photo that are too bright or much sharper than the rest.”

Of course, many photo manipulations are too slight to see with the naked eye, which is why increasingly sophisticated methods are being developed to tell a user where and how an image has been changed. Known as “digital image forensics,” the field is still rather new and niche, but companies like Fourandsix see the image verification tools they are developing as being useful not only to newsrooms but also within the scientific community and for law enforcement.

In a 2008 feature for Scientific American, Hany Farid, Fourandsix’s chief technology officer and a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, wrote about the algorithms he’d developed to help detect if a photo had been manipulated. Because there are many different ways to manipulate a photo and many degrees of manipulation, Farid worked on several methods.

One algorithm estimated the direction of light sources to see if a photo composite had been made. Another determined the consistency of light being reflected back into people’s eyes, to see if they’d actually been photographed in the same place and time. A third looked for identical blocks of pixels repeated throughout an image that would suggest the cloning tool had been used. A fourth examined the image’s pixel correlations, which if incorrect for the camera used would suggest spots of the photo or the entire image had been changed.

But a major problem, Farid wrote, is that as software continues to improve, “forgers will work on finding ways to fool each algorithm.”

“As with the spam/antispam and virus/antivirus game, not to mention criminal activity in general, an arms race between the perpetrator and the forensic analyst is inevitable,” he continued. “The field of image forensics will, however, continue to make it harder and more time-consuming (but never impossible) to create a forgery that cannot be detected.”

Connor says that ideally, future manipulation detection products will have a suite of tools that look for different signs of what’s been done to an image. But he doubts any photo manipulation detection software would ever be completely automated, since it depends on how far one takes an editing tool, not whether it has been used at all. “You really can’t remove the human judgement from it,” he said.

Part of the NPPA code of conduct dictates that “visual journalists should continuously study their craft and the ethics that guide it.” And as photographic technology evolves, newsrooms and photojournalists are constantly reevaluating and redefining the boundaries they follow, often becoming more specific in their code of conduct language, Connor writes.

Lester says it’s possible that certain technologies that are frowned on now could become more acceptable as they’re used more frequently. He uses an example HDR, or high-dynamic-range imaging, which is a technique that involves taking multiple pictures at different exposure levels. Those pictures are then “stitched” together in a way that better shows dark and bright areas.

On its Jan. 13 cover, The Washington Post used an HDR image of a bridge at sunset with a plane flying overhead as the water and sky turned a bright orange color. The caption the Post decided to use accompanying the photo read: “This image is a composite created by taking several photos and combining them with computer software to transcend the visual limitations of standard photography.”

Poynter spoke to the Post’s director of photography, Michel du Cille, about the choice; du Cille said he wanted his photographers to experiment with new techniques and technologies, reasoning, “Ten years from now, HDR may be built into cameras, and who will know it?” But NPPA’s president told Poynter that HDR is a digital manipulation “not appropriate for documentary photojournalism” because it goes against the organization’s code of ethics tenant to “respect the integrity of the photographic moment.”

The use of camera phones as a reporting tool has become increasingly accepted, though the use of camera phone applications still raises quite a bit of controversy. Critics have lashed out at journalists who use apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram, which develop photos with a vintage feel, arguing that they produce images that are just as unethical as those that have been manipulated in Photoshop.

But other photojournalists say you can’t categorically dismiss such apps as “always wrong,” in the same way Connor says that no Photoshop tool is always used to mislead.

Deciding whether a certain camera or an app is appropriate to use all boils down to two questions, says Chicago-based photojournalist Sally Ryan: “What are you shooting and what are you trying to say?”

Ryan, who shoots for the New York Times, says that as a photographer, you need to decide before you shoot what message you’re trying to convey and how you’ll present the image after it’s taken. It comes back to context, she says.

Last year, New York Times photographer Damon Winter won an award from Pictures of the Year International for a series of photographs taken on his iPhone using Hipstamatic. The photos accompanied a feature story that detailed the unglamorous day-to-day life of soldiers in Afghanistan.

Critics argued Winter should not have won the award, or used the app to take the photos, and after some time, Winter responded in a lengthy post on the Times’ photo blog.

He argued in support of using the camera phone, which is more discreet and less intimidating for soldiers. In adherence to photojournalism ethics, no content was “added, taken away, obscured or altered,” he wrote. The issue that inflamed critics, he argued, involved not content, but aesthetics, something that, like the field of photojournalism itself, is subjective. Ultimately, viewers must accept that photographers are in control of the image they present, and trust them to tell the truth, if only a version of it.

“We observe, we chose moments, we frame little slices of our world with our viewfinders, we even decide how much or how little light will illuminate our subjects, and — yes — we choose what equipment to use,” Winter wrote. “We are not walking photocopiers. We are storytellers.”

Friends, Followers and Retweets : Journalistic Objectivity in the Digital Age

In a fit of professional panic late one night, I surveyed the political leanings of my Facebook friends. How many supported Democrats? How many favored Republicans? Who had plastered their profiles with images promoting Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club or the National Rifle Association?

It was late 2006, and I was a reporter covering politics in New Hampshire. When Facebook had opened to the pubic that fall, I’d joined mostly to keep in touch with my younger brother. Pretty soon, I’d accepted friend requests from many of the political operatives I’d met covering the 2004 elections. They weren’t my friends in a traditional sense, but I saw value in those connections. Still, I worried about how publicly linking myself to these people would affect the unbiased image I cultivated as a journalist.

I was reminded of that night earlier this year when the Associated Press released new guidelines for staff members sharing, or retweeting, information on Twitter. The rules, which are part of a broader social media policy, direct AP staffers to avoid repeating opinionated tweets without quotations, colons or another indication that the opinion belongs to someone other than the journalist themselves.

Within hours of the release of the new guidelines, debates were unfolding on media blogs, Facebook and even Twitter itself. But the discussion was about more than the AP’s policy. It revealed something most of us have known for years: There’s no such thing as an objective reporter. There never has been, and there never will be – except perhaps that computer that started writing sports stories last year.

The question facing digital journalists isn’t whether or not we have opinions or community connections. Journalists, like other human beings, have friends, families and personal experiences that shape the way we see the world. Our backgrounds influence the questions we ask and the types of stories we like to tell. What we’re struggling with is when (or if)  it is appropriate to disclose details about ourselves.

Sue Burzynski Bullard, an associate professor in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, spends part of each semester coaching her students on proper use of social media. She tells them to consider anything online public and to ponder how they would feel if their tweet or Facebook post landed on the front page of the paper. Grammar and verification still matter, she says, as does the need to minimize harm.

The questions surrounding objectivity are important, she says, but not necessarily new.

“Well before social media and digital news, I realized the objectivity I was taught during the post-Watergate journalism school days was not completely realistic,” Bullard said via email. “As an editor in the newsroom…my background – as a woman, a mother, a Catholic, a first-in-the-family college graduate, etc. – all played into what I thought was an interesting story.  It made me a strong believer that none of us were really objective and that it meant we needed diverse voices around that table arguing for stories from different viewpoints.”

Yes, we’re all individuals, but most of us agree that the work we produce must be unbiased and should adhere to certain standards. The particulars of these standards vary among newsrooms, but the basics are the same:  Don’t make stuff up. Don’t steal other people’s work. Clearly attribute your information. Stay out of the story. Seek out all sides of a debate. Be accurate and fair.

Avoiding public disclosures of personal politics still makes sense for journalists working for news organizations with established brands. Readers can decide to trust—or decry—a publication based on its history, its ownership or its editorial philosophy. Though increasingly, journalists are brands of one, lone storytellers peddling their work online. Those independent voices may choose to share personal information as a means of building trust with readers. A growing number of bloggers and freelance writers publish information about themselves, their background and in some cases, the source of their income.

“I’ve inched toward the idea that if we’re transparent about our biases, we’re more credible than if we pretend we don’t have any biases,” Bullard said. “At the same time, I still wouldn’t want folks covering politics to declare their love or affection for any candidate – in a yard sign, on Facebook or in a Tweet.”

Rob Pegoraro, a former Washington Post reporter who now freelances about technology, draws an important distinction between personal opinions and personal involvement in a blog post about the new AP guidelines. Pegoraro compares the standard to The Prime Directive – a fictional, but useful, noninterference philosophy from the Star Trek universe.

“What makes us journalists is not some magical firewall in our heads that blocks after-hours contemplation of our reporting, but a willingness to look for evidence that disproves whatever theory we’ve been working on in a story,” Pegoraro wrote. “We fail our obligation to the truth not by developing opinions, but by letting them divert our research.”

Blog posts like Pegoraro’s, as well as the public debate to which they contribute, are important as we continue to understand what it means to be a digital journalist. Best practices for using social media and other tools are still emerging, and it’s important they evolve based on the experiences of the people who need them most. John Wayne Ferguson, a copy editor and graduate student at Boston University has seen how difficult it is for the industry to keep up with such rapid technological changes.

“It's hard, I imagine, to find people to teach the best practices of social media, when the best practices are still being defined,” he said in an email. “I think in a couple years, there might be more agreement about what works and what doesn't.”

Ferguson tweets regularly, but doesn’t use his account for official business. That may, however, be a function of his position.

“As a copy editor and paginator, I'm already a behind-the-scenes kind of guy,” he said. “I think I want my social media persona to stay back too. But, work-related or not, I try to source things accurately, favor the (retweet) button over retyping other people's tweets and to not spread rumors. I think I just naturally try to live by the same ethics I work by.”

It’s been five years since my midnight Facebook panic, but I still struggle with how to conduct myself online, especially now that New Hampshire’s 2012 presidential primary is underway. Some of the social media personas of the people covering the race areas are as prominent as the candidates themselves, and virtually every campaign and special interest group is reaching out to journalists like me over Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Some things are obvious: I wouldn’t, for instance, share my personal opinions about a candidate’s economic policy or decorate my profile with images from a special interest group’s website. Nor do I “like” Facebook pages belonging to campaigns or special interest groups. I visit those pages often, and have linked to them from blog posts when pertinent, but the term “like” is just a little too enthusiastic. On Twitter, I don’t follow the candidates. Instead, I group them into a list, as much for convenience as maintaining the appearance of neutrality.

When it comes to sharing information, things get trickier, which is probably why the AP wrote its guidelines for Twitter in the first place. Those of us who spend a lot of time on social networks know the culture, and understand that retweets or Facebook shares mean we found something interesting, not something with which we agree. That distinction might not be so clear to casual visitors to those networks.

It’s rare for me to retweet something directly from a candidate’s official account, but not because I fear it will imply favoritism. I want my Twitter feed to be a curated mix of the most interesting observations about politics, journalism and my community, a sort of high-tech reporter’s notebook. A canned statement from a PR guy seldom fits the bill. I also try to avoid posts dripping with sarcasm because Twitter leaves little room for adding context.

As for the political leanings of my Facebook friends, they were – and are – pretty diverse. And that’s the way I like it. Google and other search engines filter the Internet using keywords and algorithms. Social networks present information based on the personal interests and opinions of users. And, as a journalist, it’s my job to connect with and listen to them all. I routinely connect on social networks with people I’ve met in all sort of ways: at the yoga studio, in writing groups and through the political campaigns I have helped cover. My comfort with this might, however, have something to do with an evolving understanding of what it means to be connected.

Earlier this fall, The New York Times reported on a study by the University of Milan that examined relationships among the world’s 721 million Facebook users. According to the findings, we’re all separate {wc} by an average of just 4.74 people.

“We are close, in a sense, to people who don’t necessarily like us, sympathize with us or have anything in common with us,” Jon Kleinberg, a Cornell professor involved in the study, told the Times. “It’s the weak ties that make the world small.”

Robot Ethics

“If not yet the world, robots are starting to dominate the news headlines,” writes Patrick Lin in his introduction to Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics.  For years, robots and other forms of artificial intelligence have been performing tasks in factories and making mass production easier than ever. The automation process has slowly transitioned into other areas as well. Robots now are used by militaries to attack enemies and serve as caregivers for infants and the elderly. There are robots used as sex toys, and robots that facilitate surgeons in performing difficult operations.

With new qualities and new responsibilities come new ethical questions. Who is responsible for the actions carried out by a robot? What happens when something goes wrong? Are there laws that prevent humans from abusing robots, and vice versa? What happens when robots start making ethical decisions? Wherein lies the ethical boundary between which tasks robots can perform, and which ones they can’t?

To prevent any misunderstandings about the ethical questions, it is well worth defining “robot ethics.” Wendell Wallach, lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University and co-author of Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, defines robot ethics the following way:

“Robot Ethics tends to break down into two different fields. One looks at the societal and ethical issues that arise in the adoption of robots by humans, and the other looks at the prospect that the robots themselves may be capable of factoring ethical sensitivities and legal concerns into the very actions and choices that they make. Many scholars distinguish the two fields by calling the later Machine Ethics.”

While the first field deals with the appropriate use of robots in social contexts, the second field goes beyond mere programming. Instead, it addresses “whether increasingly autonomous robots will in some circumstances be able to engage in explicit ethical decision-making,” Wallach says.

To this day, there are “no laws, and no need for laws, about how humans should treat robots,” Wallach notes.

With robots entering a variety of new fields, taking over roles previously performed by humans, academics are investigating the human-robot relationships in more detail. For their article “The crying shame of robot nannies: an ethical appraisal,” Noel and Amanda Sharkey researched whether robots should be used as nannies, stating that “The whole idea of robot childcare is a new one and has not had time to get into the statute books. There have been no legal test cases yet and there is little provision in the law“ (180). In the case of robot nannies, Sharkey & Sharkey explain,

“The various international nanny codes of ethics (e.g. FICE Bulletin 1998) do not deal with the robot nanny but require the human nanny to ensure that the child is socialised with other children and adults and that they are taught social responsibility and values. These requirements are not enforceable by the law.” (180).

In fact, in “Robot Rights,” Guo and Zhang say that, “because different cultures may disagree on the most appropriate uses for robots, it is unrealistic and impractical to make an internationally unified code of ethics.” (Guo, S. & Zhang, G. (2009). Robot Rights, Letter to Science, 323, 876).

So if there are no laws for robots, who is ethically responsible for them? The “people who create and deploy them [the robots] for specific purposes are responsible,” Wallach states. Even though robots are beginning to make moral decisions, they are still simple machines and those who build, design, and deploy robots are responsible for their actions. Wallach points out that “the robots we have today are just migrating beyond being very simple machines and they have no intelligence, no smarts of their own.” He adds that, “they have no right either as moral agents, but more importantly as moral patients, as someone to whom we should give ethical regard or give any ethical concern.”

Nevertheless, Wallach recognizes that the recent advancements in robotics are adding intricacies to question of responsibility. “It is becoming more and more difficult for those who design and build semi-autonomous robotic systems to predict how those systems will act in new situations with new inputs,” he says. It is this fact that “makes the ethical question [of “Who bears responsibility when something goes wrong or someone is harmed”] more difficult,” Wallach explains. Nevertheless, he is convinced that “that does not mean that the robots are in any way shape or form responsible for their actions.”

The responsibility still lies with the humans; it is “the same kind of responsibility we have for any other tool we use,” Wallach says. Each time a robot assists in performing a surgery, you can still thank, - or blame, - a human. A similar situation is presented when robots care for children. “We could say in absolute terms that it is ethically unacceptable to create a robot that appears to have mental states and emotional understanding,” claim Sharkey & Sharkey. “However, if it is the child’s natural anthropomorphism that is deceiving her, then it could be argued that there are no moral concerns for the roboticist or manufacturer.” (172).

In fact, Sharkey & Sharkey even raise a point that takes the question even further. One of their article’s sections is even entitled “Is robot care better than minimal care?” By asking this question, they raise an important point: whose ethical responsibility is it when you don’t create or deploy a robot to perform a certain action?

Given the evidence of benefits occurring as a result of the use of robots by children in the home, in the classroom and in therapeutic applications (Sharkey & Sharkey, 162), it appears that humans in fact have an ethical responsibility to use robots in certain situations.

Despite this responsibility, however, the question isn’t as close as those in the Discovery News suggest. Wallach concludes, “those of us working in the field of robotics think that it is going to be a long time, if ever, before we will cross thresholds that we would be giving robots any kind of rights.”

Purchasing Twitter and Facebook Followers

When conducting marketing for sites such as holidayapartments.net, I hand-select websites and blogs to place advertisements. In this manual selection process, several factors are taken into account, including the site’s Google page rank, the number of backlinks, meaning the number of incoming links from other websites, as well as its number of Facebook and Twitter followers. To advertise on a site, for example, it has to have a Page Rank of 3/10 or more, or at least 500 Facebook and/or Twitter followers.

We all know that Facebook and Twitter aren’t the only social media portals out there – just look at the recent spike in Pinterest users. But Facebook and Twitter continue to be the main networks that determine a person or a brand’s social media influence. Websites such as Search Engine Journal even provide entire articles on “Facebook Fan Acquisition Strategies.” In fact, many companies have already taken these strategies to heart, providing discounts exclusively for Facebook users, as well as an “incentivized like,” where Facebook users can access specific content only when they “like” the Facebook page in question. “Get Fans. Get Revenue,” reads the slogan of the Search Engine Journal article by Brian Carter.

It appears that social media is gaining increasing popularity and power; after all, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world, according to socialnomics.net. Advertisers in particular have come to rely on the number of followers to determine where to situate their commercials.

But what if the number of followers has been manipulated? What if they are being bought and sold, just like any other product on the market?

I came across this issue when conducting marketing work for MyCityCuisine.org. Founder Jim Zhu advised me only to trust Google Page Rank to evaluate a website’s popularity. “Facebook followers can be purchased at a very low cost,” Zhu said, adding:

“For example, out of 638 mycitycuisine followers, about 500 of them were purchased through a company that offers social media marketing service at very low cost - I did it as an experiment to see if the social media marketing can produce real result. None of these followers have participated in any discussions. I suspect many are fake accounts. So I don't trust the number of Facebook followers.”

With a simple Google search, I came across a plethora articles that mentioned how Twitter and Facebook followers could be bought through numerous websites, such as Twiends. What’s more, followers were even being auctioned on eBay for pennies, as TechCrunch reports. Many times, the differences in prices were determined by whether the followers to be bought were “targeted” or “non-targeted;” that is, whether they would be relevant to (and thus possibly interested in) your company. In a response to the TechCrunch article, one user said that he conducted an experiment purchasing both targeted and untargeted followers. He concluded to “buy only targeted followers” since they resulted in a high number of clicks to his products, and thus “are worth investing money.”

But is it ethical to purchase social media followers? Isn’t this misleading for advertisers who rely on number of followers to determine whether a site has a wide impact? Social Technologist Christian Payne (@Documentally) opines, “it is very misleading to those that you are meant to be engaging with.” By purchasing followers, people are “basically hid[ing] behind this number of fake followers and a network that [they] haven’t at all nurtured, according to Payne.

Companies have an ethical responsibility to not obscure their number of followers by purchasing fake ones. In fact, companies such as Twiends pride themselves on providing “ethical community building.” Their guidelines read:

“Unfortunately, some groups will attempt to grow their audiences via any means possible, including means that can be considered unethical, a violation of twitter's terms of service, or in some cases criminal too. Twiends decided to make its mark in the Twitter ecosystem by being the 'good' community growing service. We recognized that our long-term success would only come about if we played by ALL the rules, consistently and fairly. Our number one priority is to always take our guidance from Twitter and to conform to their terms of service always. We recognize that failure to do this will result in our service not enduring through the years.”

Advertisers, in turn, need to be aware of this issue and instead use other tools to determine a site’s popularity. Payne suggests that a viable alternative is to look at the number of lists that a Twitter follower is on. The Twitter blog explains: “Twitter users can organize others into groups, or “lists”. When you click to view a list, you'll see a stream of Tweets from all the users included in that group.”

Payne adds, “For me, that is way more important than how many followers someone has, because people are taking the time to curate your Twitter account into a particular list.” He also warns that Twitter “has managed to bury [the visibility of lists] now in the new interface.” He also advises that, “if someone follows me and they’re not on any lists and have masses of followers, and they’re not necessarily following that many people, I tend to report them as spam.”

As everyday Twitter users who aren’t advertisers, we might ask ourselves why we should care whether others are purchasing followers or not. According to Payne, there not only lies a vacuum behind purchasing fake followers, but doing so would also ruin Twitter for what it is. “For me, some of the people in my Twitter network have become my best friends,” he says. “There’s people that make me laugh, there’s people who make me cry, there’s people who hire me for business, there’s people that I hire for business…If everybody went out and [purchased masses of followers] tomorrow, you’d be breaking how Twitter works for everybody.” As Erik Schonfeld writes, “you can’t buy real followers. They come to you.”

The Ethics of Online Scoring Systems for Art

Is there such a thing as a perfect work of art? You could argue that Michelangelo's “Pieta,” Orson Welles' “Citizen Kane,” Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao and Picasso's “Guernica” come close, but perfection is an abstract concept and not really something that is ever attainable.

Conversely, are there works of art that are entirely without worth? The big screen oeuvre of Rob Schneider and the entire genre of hair metal come to mind, but again it's impossible to argue that something is utterly and completely devoid of merit.

That being said, there are more and more websites that are trying to turn critical appraisal into mathematical precision, often giving creative works either perfect scores of 100 or scores of absolute zero. I have taught a class on reviewing the arts for several years now, and while I encourage my students to use sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Meta Critic to find reviews to read and study, I caution them about those sites' overall scoring systems.

I recently took some time to examine how the sites calculate their scores and discovered some disturbing trends. On the surface, they both mean well and attempt to provide consumers with a valuable service—by aggregating and averaging the critical appraisals of various works of art, they try to give a clear, objective sense of whether something is worth your time and money.

The process appears pretty straightforward when critics use some type of scoring mechanism themselves. For example, Roger Ebert gives the films he reviews a score of one to four stars. That means that if he gives a film three stars, Meta Critic averages him in as a 75. But wait, a 75 is a C at an academic institution, and anyone who reads Ebert knows that three stars from him is a heck of a lot better than a C. So, the math is already fuzzy when it comes to these critical averages.

But what happens when a critic doesn't use a rating system? Many A-list critics do not use these systems (Ebert is an exception), so how do the sites average in these reviews? Rotten Tomatoes says it doesn't use a review in their averaging if the critic does not use a scoring system. According to their site: "Each critic's original rating scale (star, letter grade, numeric) is converted to a number between 1 and 10, and then the numbers are averaged. Reviews without original ratings are not counted, and a minimum of five reviews with original ratings is required."

That would mean the opinions of many of the most influential and experienced critics are not computed into the Rotten Tomatoes average. But wouldn't that seriously skew the rating? Things get even stranger when you search on Rotten Tomatoes for the work of the New York Times' Manohla Dargis, an esteemed critic who does not use a scoring system. You actually find scores next to her reviews. For example, the site lists a score of 3.5/5 stars for the recent film “Chronicle,” and at the top of her index page on Rotten Tomatoes it says, Manohla Dargis "Agrees with the Tomatometer 76% of the time." Something definitely does not compute.

Dargis’ reviews on the Times’ site actually do include a 1-5 rating system. However, this rating mechanism is for readers who want to weigh in on a film, and it is not used by Dargis, herself. If Rotten Tomatoes is actually averaging in that information as Dargis’ opinion, then the math is way off. (I reached out to Rotten Tomatoes for some clarification, and I have yet to receive a response.)

How does Meta Critic handle using reviews by a reviewer like Dargis who does not include a scoring system? Their approach is quite subjective. The site explains, "our staff must assign a numeric score, from 0-100, to each review that is not already scored by the critic. Naturally, there is some discretion involved here, and there will be times when you disagree with the score we assigned." So basically, if Dargis won't score her own reviews, Meta Critic will do it for her.

Where the practice of Meta Critic assigning scores falls apart most is on reviews where the website says Dargis felt a film was perfect (100) or worthless (0). The site lauds 33 of her film reviews with a perfect score of 100, and it slaps seven films with a complete goose egg. However, when you dig into some of the critiques, nothing is really perfect. In her review of Avatar (100 on Meta Critic), Dargis derides the film for "some of the comically broad dialogue," and when writing about Moneyball (also 100 on Meta Critic), she opines, "There are some overhead shots of the A’s emerald field too, including one of a large American flag being unfurled, that feel like the efforts of a director needlessly looking for big symbolic moments, perhaps particularly post-Sept. 11."

In the end, where does all this crazy critical computing leave us? It underscores the fact that reviews of the arts are always subjective and cannot be turned into hard numbers. I encourage my students to use both Rotten Tomatoes and Meta Critic because both sites aggregate and organize the work of a lot of smart and creative critics. But I advise them to avoid the numbers, focus on the words of the critics and decide for themselves.

Link me up for $$$: The ethics behind online advertising

There has always been a fine line in being ethical when advertising. In the quest to sell and beat the competition, it is easy for advertisers to pass from telling the truth to making exaggerated, or even entirely false claims. Further unethical behaviors, such as bait-and-switch offers, have existed since the advent of advertising. Even in the traditional (by that I mean “paper”) media, the difference between advertising and actual, non-endorsed content has become obscured.

Jessica Gottlieb describes herself as “an empowered consumer and a mom blogger in Los Angeles.” She recalls that “when the LA Times sold its front cover to NBC with an ad that was easy to mistake for news, [she and her husband] started thinking about cancelling [their] subscription.” To demonstrate her discontent, she even made a video that documented the scandal for the world to see.

In fact, this isn’t the only time Gottlieb has used technology to combat what she believes is unethical. In 2009, she started the #motrinmom hashtag, protesting against a Johnson & Johnson campaign for Motrin which advocated “baby wearing.” Specifically, the advertisement included a 20-something voice reading the following text:

“Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion. I mean, in theory it’s a great idea. There’s the front baby carrier, sling, schwing, wrap, pouch. And who knows what else they’ve come up with. Wear your baby on your side, your front, go hands free. Supposedly, it’s a real bonding experience. They say that babies carried close to the body tend to cry less than others. But what about me? Do moms that wear their babies cry more than those who don’t. I sure do! These things put a ton of strain on your back, your neck, your shoulders. Did I mention your back? I mean, I’ll put up with the pain because it’s a good kind of pain; it’s for my kid. Plus, it totally makes me look like an official mom. And so if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.”

As the New York Times reported, consumers, including Gottlieb, were “offended by the suggestion that they carry their babies to be 'fashionable'" Via Twitter, YouTube and other online media, Gottlieb and her followers began boycotting the advertisement and succeeded – Johnson & Johnson eventually pulled the advertisements from public circulation.

Gottlieb herself is “not convinced that [the ethical hazards of conventional advertising] are all that different” from online advertising. “It might be easier to confuse advertising and content online than it would be in old media, but as the web evolves, the consumer does too,” she says.

However, one might argue that there are plenty of consumers who have not yet undergone such an evolution and who are subject to the ethical hazards of online advertising. Leanne Hoagland-Smith, a sales coach and author of Be the Red Jacket in a Sea of Gray Suits, recalls:

“From my own personal experience, I responded to an online ad to join a website that would guarantee me traffic, send me leads and made a lot of promises.  I did some research, but at that time I was quite ignorant of some tools that I now use. The claims were fraudulent and today my website gets more traffic than the one I paid $700 for a lifetime membership. Unfortunately, I was naïve and trusting. Their customer service was a run around. Later I was able to track other people who had been duped by this unethical advertiser.”

As a sales coach, Hoagland-Smith has moreover come across “clients who sought the expertise of online marketers for improved search engine optimization and received less than desirable results.” She explains, “the challenge was in the fine print and once again the ignorance of the buyer resulted in thousands of dollars being spent with little to no results.”

Reading the fine print of terms and conditions has been around since the first written contracts were developed. Similarly, the code of ethics put forth by The American Marketing Association (AMA) does not specifically adapt itself to the new digital circumstances with its constantly evolving technologies. According to the AMA’s code of ethics, marketers must:

1. Do no harm. This means consciously avoiding harmful actions or omissions by embodying high ethical standards and adhering to all applicable laws and regulations in the choices we make.
2. Foster trust in the marketing system. This means striving for good faith and fair dealing so as to contribute toward the efficacy of the exchange process as well as avoiding deception in product design, pricing, communication and delivery of distribution.
3. Embrace ethical values. This means building relationships and enhancing consumer confidence in the integrity of marketing by affirming these core values: honesty, responsibility, fairness, respect, transparency and citizenship.

The code goes into detail on each of the ethical values, which are geared towards marketing in general. Similarly, Hoagland-Smith mentions that, “in the USA, there are federal agencies such as FDA that attempt to ensure what is being said is truthful along with state governments through their agencies.”

But are there guidelines, laws or codes that specifically address online advertising? What is it that is new in the digital age? “One of the key differences is the immediacy to share with much larger communities and how that sharing can go viral in a matter of hours,” says Hoagland-Smith. “Someone can quickly Tweet about his or her experience and suddenly the company is engaged in countering a negative PR campaign,” she adds. This is precisely what happened with Gottlieb’s use of Twitter and the #motrinmom hashtag. As Hoagland-Smith notes, “the adage 'buyer beware' still rings as true today as it did 200 years ago. Being educated now is much easier than ever before because of access to information through the Internet.”

Christopher Bauer works with organizations that want to develop and maintain a culture of ethics and values-driven business through his Bauer Ethics Seminars. He adds: “Consumers have a responsibility to be informed simply to be knowledgeable consumers. I don't know that I would call that an ethical responsibility in most cases, however. One exception might be that consumers would be ethically compromised if they used products harmful to others because they did not educate themselves about readily-available, documented risks.”

Kapil Rampal, CEO of Creative Crest, is a veteran in the online industry with 19 years of leadership experience at major online companies. To combat unethical online advertising more effectively, Rampal proposes what he calls “self-regulation”:

“Despite strict laws against spam email it has increased tremendously. Self-regulation such a spam filters, RBLs, IP rating, etc. are much more effective. In online advertising self-regulation can be more powerful than laws.”

So what of the future of ethical online advertising? Rampal calls for “stronger self-regulation by publishers, advertising networks, advertising agencies and advertisers to follow ethical practices. Many publishers associations have banned specific unethical ad formats.” Hoagland-Smith, in turn, affirms that the trend is moving towards mobile advertising. But the format—paper, online, or mobile advertising—appears to be secondary. “Ethical people will behave ethically and unethical people will behave unethically,” says Hoagland-Smith. “My sense [is that] there is greater visibility for those companies that are less ethical. Bad news always travels faster than good news.”

Corrections and Online News

I recently was on the receiving end of a rather humorous correction to one of my articles when it appeared online. An Op/Ed feature I wrote for the Chicago Tribune went through copy edit, and the word "their" was changed to "tits" when they actually meant to change it to "its." I laughed when I saw the silly mistake, sent an email to my editor about it and the change was quickly made. No muss, no fuss.

Changes and corrections in the world of journalism are not always so funny, though. Newspapers don't like to make them, but most do so diligently. Print and digital are very different in this regard, though. If a change is made to an article that originally appears online and did not come from the print edition, if that change is not called out prominently then the reader assumes the mistake or error never occurred in the first place.

That dynamic got me thinking about how journalism corrections are handled in the digital age, and so I investigated how some major news sites handle the process.

The New York Times’ site may have the gold standard for dealing with this issue. The term “Corrections” is clearly called out in the home page navigation, and when you click on the link you go to a simple, well-organized page that lists corrections two ways. At the top of the page there are links to corrections that occurred on recent dates, and beneath that are links to articles that have been recently amended.

When you click on a date, you see a list of the changes and a concise explanation of why they were made. On the day I looked, they ranged from correcting a quote made by presidential candidate Mitt Romney to re-indentifying a hockey player in a photo caption. When you click on the link to the article in which the mistake occurred, that page also contains the correction, noted prominently at the bottom of the story. The only real issue with how the Times handles this is that it can be a bit difficult to tell if the article is from the newspaper or was original to their site.

On their corrections index page, the Times also encourages its readers to contact them about errors they may see, and they list an email address and a phone number to use to send them in. And then the Times does something really interesting – they go a step further in the process of assuring their readers that their concerns will be taken seriously. The Times gives another avenue if someone is unhappy with the response they receive about an error: “Readers dissatisfied with a response or concerned about the paper’s journalistic integrity may reach the public editor at public@nytimes.com or (212) 556-7652.” The Times is anything but perfect, however their commitment to accuracy in this regard is both commendable and fairly water tight.

How does CNN’s website, which gets substantially more traffic than the Times, handle corrections? Unlike the Times, there is no link on the site’s home page to a section that aggregates corrections. I then used the site’s search engine to look for a “corrections” section, but the results only took me to articles in which the term is used as part of the story.

I then resorted to doing a Google search for “corrections on CNN.com.” That generated a link to an index page of corrections on CNN Money’s site, but not one for CNN. CNN Money’s page was similar to that of the Times – a chronological list of corrections with links to the articles, with the corrections notice also repeated at the end of the article.  The URL for the CNN Money corrections page is http://money.cnn.com/news/corrections/.

So, would the elusive CNN corrections page exist at http://cnn.com/news/corrections/? That link actually leads to the dreaded “Page not found” page. OK, well what about just http://www.cnn.com/corrections/? Again, no luck.

I am not the only one who has been frustrated with CNN’s way of handling corrections online. In Dec. 2010, PBS.org ran an article on their Idea Lab blog about the process of contacting CNN to ask them to correct a mistake in a video report in which the prime minister of New Zealand was misidentified. More than a month after sending in a report about the error, CNN had still not responded. Frustrated, the blog author wrote, “for all we know, the network may have already issued a correction on the air weeks ago. The problem is, there's no way to find out on its website because CNN.com has no corrections content at all.” (CNN eventually did make the correction, but it was almost 6 weeks after the fact.)

But what about across the pond? Do papers in other countries handle the process any differently? I surfed across the sea to check out The Guardian’s site, which attracts more than 4 million users a month. There is a prominent “Corrections” link on the home page that links to a detailed section devoted to “Corrections and clarifications” that is organized chronologically, much like the Times. Accuracy, it seems, is a priority at The Guardian as well.

The three preceding examples are all from news organizations with reputations for liberal/progressive points of view. What about a news organization that emphatically leans right?

There is no link on the home page of Fox News’ site to any sections dealing with corrections. A search of the site for “corrections” results in the same thing I found at CNN – a list of articles that include the word. Could Google get me there?

The top result for searching “corrections on Fox News” was a link to the “Fox New Corrections” Twitter feed. However, this was not run by Fox, and its last Tweet was in 2009. Could it be that Fox News has yet to make a mistake? Given the network’s rather high opinion of itself, it’s a safe bet that some people there may think so.

All kidding aside, though, what does this survey say about correcting journalism mistakes in the digital age? First, because of the massive amount of information being generated, it’s a difficult, time-intensive process that requires the audience to be actively involved. And second, if a site does not do it well, it not only will alienate and frustrate its audience, but also it will eventually be a credibility killer.

Blogging, Quotes, and Sources

If there is one thing that should matter to reporters – online or elsewhere – it is the sacredness of the quote.

The quotation marks and what falls between them are the blood and guts of any article. They set the tone of the story and give life to what could otherwise be a plain statement of facts. A good quote means you found the right source, you know how to ask the right questions and you are a competent note-taker. And it’s no exaggeration to say where quotes are placed and how they move the narrative along can be the difference between the Pulitzer Prize and what lines the bottom of a bird cage.

How you use quotes in a modern context also determines something else – whether you are a hack or a professional. Because in this new age of texts, blogs, chat rooms, Facebook walls and everything else in between, there needs to be guidelines as to how people’s words are found, shared and conveyed within the written word, virtual or not.

The questions for today’s reporter are many. If you write for a blog, how do you know what is appropriate to use and what shouldn’t be mentioned? If you write for a newspaper, do you have to tell the reader that your quotes are from an email and not through a face-to-face conversation? Can you use a quote from a chat room without someone's permission?

The answers, once clear and definite, are now clouded by gray areas that bear discussion. With so many new places to write – and so many new writers – there needs to be a new conversation about how we talk to sources, how we write what these sources say and whether quotations still carry the weight they once did, given how first-person posts are considered newsworthy and relevant.

Is blogging or writing for online news sources less serious or less requiring ethical standards than traditional reporting? The apparent answer is a resounding, “No.” But a variety of news-gathering experts agree that there needs to be more disclosure of how quotes are gained, where the conversation took place and whether the source agrees that the statement was communicated to the reader correctly. And the digital world actually gives reporters more leeway to fix mistakes and make the record of someone’s statements correct if there was an error when first published.

Reporters are taught from their first newspaper class in high school that quotes spice up a story. In an ideal world, you meet with a source in person and have an in-depth conversation about the topic. Wide-ranging questions are asked and answered honestly and thoroughly. The conversation is taken down in notes or recorded. Those words are then translated, edited and included in the story. Boom – you have journalism in a nutshell.

The rules really haven’t changed. But these days, people are emailing their questions in advance and using written answers in their stories. A reporter might text a source during a deadline or on a breaking story to have their comment faster than the competition. A chat room for ex-employees might glean new insights or conversations that a reporter might otherwise not be privy to in traditional reporting. All these are fair ways to gain information.

Bonnie Caprara, a Metro Detroit freelance writer who works for daily newspapers and online blogs told me via a chat session that she once did the rounds at cop shops and the like. Now, she follows her sources on Twitter and Facebook. She uses their comments there as launching points for stories – but she feels the ethical thing to do is follow up with an email to set up interviews for her articles. Some reporters, however, take those comments straight from Facebook without informing the reader where they came from.

As Caprara argues, that reporter should disclose where they gained the quotes and why. I’ve noticed that many newspapers and blogs are starting to do this. For example, a reporter might note that they talked to a source on the phone You see this particularly in exchanges between an entertainment writer and a Hollywood-based celebrity. It seems fair that all reporters do the same, especially when the conversation takes place on a telephone texting exchange, where information might come fast and furious (and misspelled or auto-corrected, but that’s a problem for another time).

Meeting in person also gives a story one more bonus, points out Paul Bradshaw, publisher of the Online Journalism Blog and founder of Help Me Investigate. He also is co-author of “The Online Journalism Handbook: Skills to Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age” and leads the MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University and is Visiting Professor at City University.

“As always I think there are subtleties here that are often missed: in-person interviews are generally better because you get more color (if you're a good writer) and the interviewee has less time to prepare their answer,” Bradshaw told me during an email exchange on Facebook. “I think it's often too easy for a journalism student to hide behind email and easily copy and paste the Q&A format into a piece.”

While there is space within journalism for experts to write first-person or original blog posts, Bradshaw does believe in traditional standards when it comes to good journalism.

“I do, however, every year urge students not to rely on email for interviews, but instead to use it as a last resort (it's too easily ignored or put off). In fact, this year, I had one session where the students had two hours to get a story and were not allowed to use email!” he wrote.

On the other hand, some bloggers may find their editors do not require quotes at all. These exchanges between the reader and writer are more intimate in a way; you know all of the information is coming from what is presumably an expert in their field. One such writer is Melissa Preddy, who does a daily blog for the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, a part of the Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism in Phoenix.

“I have relaxed my standards about email interviews a bit – haven't really done any but I would if need be due to time constraints – and I think it is good to say ‘wrote in an email,’” Preddy told me via an email exchange between us.

She does have issue with bloggers that fail to do what insiders call primary-source reporting. That’s where a reporter gains the information on their own rather than through other reporters, sources or materials.

“It seems certain ‘factoids’ get picked up and repeated, rinse and repeat so many times, that they become gospel and no one bothers to check them out. Like ‘agriculture is Michigan's second-largest industry’ (it's not) or ‘it's cheaper to buy fast food than fruits and vegetables.’ (NYT just did a piece attempting to debunk that.) I think many bloggers rely too much on links and the written word of others,” Preddy wrote.

This essay did lead me to talk to one source on the phone – that was Jack Lessenberry, a full-time member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University. He also is WUOM-FM's senior political analyst as well as a writer for many national and regional publications, including Vanity Fair, Esquire, George, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. (I would have talked to him in person because he does live and work by me; but the poor man’s schedule has him too busy to chat…our phone conversation took place in part as he navigated a parking garage.)

What are quotation ethics for today’s digital journalist? Lessenberry made his thoughts plain: “They are no different than those for print, broadcast, radio or television journalists. You don’t steal stuff. You don’t plagiarize. You find the facts and you report them.”

Reporters have one primary job, Lessenberry added. That is to make the significant interesting, and a lot of the interest takes place between quotation marks. No typical Joe on the Street understands the national debt. But if he reads great articles about it in the Wall Street Journal, chances are he walks away better informed that he previous was. And he might have enjoyed the education in the process.

“If democracy is going to work, we need an informed citizenry,” and good journalistic ethics are an important part of that, Lessenberry said.

Sloppier reporting is so much easier to find in the digital age, Lessenberry said. There are more ethical breaches because there are more people (trained and untrained) writing. Having a journalism degree isn’t necessary to have a blog that people follow religiously. You don’t need to have aced your ethics class to get a gig on the Huffington Post. All you have to do is have a few fired up rants on the latest celebrity scandal and you’re an overnight sensation in the reporting world. Or, at least, you have a blog that can be monetized for personal gain. And when you blog to get attention or write to get ads on your site, you’re probably not going to be that concerned about whether what you write is true or right or even has two or more sources.

“We have an obligation (as journalists) to be fair and responsible,” Lessenberry said. “You’ve got to filter out the significant from the trivial. … If aliens came to Earth, they would think we’re all homicidal sex perverts who steal money. Everything is about Jennifer Aniston or the Kardashians. It’s easier and sexier to write about the latest blond woman lost in Aruba than the debate over affordable education. And the missing blond has no impact on my life or the lives of my children.”

The other side of the coin for digital reporting is that everything is under the microscope. If you do make a mistake, then it’s there for the public’s massive consumption. “Everybody hears it, everybody sees it and everybody reads it,” Lessenberry said. “Everything is recorded. … I’m convinced that what happened to Don Imus would have been forgotten if it had happened before everything was recorded and replayed over and over again.”

Good quotes, as is true for good ethics, take time to develop. If you’ve been counting, you’ll notice I talked to pretty much everyone for this essay via phone, chat room, email or Facebook. And that’s how I’ve written for the past six years as a freelance writer. Perhaps this is the way I’ll continue to do it. But I do appreciate the difference between in person conversations and those that that place in other ways. What I do – and how I write it – does indeed matter to me as a writer and to the reader. And that can never get lost in translation.

Twitter, Twossip, and the Library of Congress

"Have you ever sent out a ‘tweet’ on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress,” reported the official blog of the Library of Congress back in April 2010. Each and every public tweet since Twitter’s inception in March 2006 has been digitally archived in the Library of Congress. “That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions,” said Matt Raymond of the Library of Congress blog.

The idea behind the project? Twitter has become an important source of information that reaches billions of users located all over on the globe. Raymond mentioned significant tweets over the past years, including:

- the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey
- President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election
- a set of two tweets (1 and 2) from James Buck, a graduate student of the University of California-Berkeley. As a photojournalist, he was arrested while covering an anti-government protest in Mahalla, Egypt. He was freed because of a series of events set in motion by his first tweet: “Arrested.” Buck literally “twittered” his way out of jail, as CNN reported.

The Library of Congress sees itself as a place where “important historical and other information in digital form should be preserved for the long haul,” according to Raymond. The acquisition of tweets by the Library of Congress, in turn, comes with scholarly and research implications, as well as numerous ethical questions.

First and foremost, we may ask ourselves—as some researchers have already done—whether it is ethical to harvest public tweets without first obtaining specific, informed consent by the subjects.

Michael Zimmer, Co-Director of the Center for Information Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, recalls a recent debate on precisely this subject during the workshop titled “Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research:”  “Many in the room felt that consent was not necessary since the tweets are public, a conscious choice made by the user to allow the whole world see her activity,” Zimmer said. “In short, by not restricting access to one’s account, there is no expectation of privacy.”

Zimmer himself, however, argued that, “We cannot be so quick to presume the expectations of potential research subjects. Yes, setting one’s Twitter stream to public does mean that anyone can search for you, follow you, and view your activity. However, there is a reasonable expectation that one’s tweet stream will be 'practically obscure' within the thousands (if not millions) of tweets similarly publicly viewable.”

A public tweeter, according to Zimmer, consents to making his or her tweets visible to those who take the time and energy to seek him or her out. Automatic consent to have one’s tweet stream systematically followed, harvested, archived and mined by researchers, however, has not been given by the user. Zimmer himself believes strongly that researchers should seek consent prior to capturing and using this data.

The Library of Congress might argue that they gave an “initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress,” as Raymond wrote. But when comparing the number of followers of @librarycongress (50,000) to the total number of Twitter users, very few users really know that their tweets are on file for research and more.

Moreover, what does it mean to use tweets for research? Are they really a reliable source of information? In Zimmer’s opinion, tweets “are reliable in terms of what public discourse on certain topics might be (or at least the discourse of those using Twitter).”

While Zimmer would “hesitate using [tweets] for journalistic purposes without getting additional verification,” others certainly have done so. Precisely for this reason, criticism of effective journalism has also been made. On his blog, Bob Cusick, who describes himself as a “tech guy, entrepreneur and consumer of all things digital,” writes:

“I was watching CNN the other day - and they actually showed a reporter posting tweets - on the air! What the?? If I'm watching CNN - I don't want to see people Twittering... or checking their email... or writing a blog post... I want to watch people report the news.”

The question appears to be that whether we can make sense of the data extracted from tweets outside of the context of Twitter, be it for research purposes or journalistic ones. Zimmer opines, “to me, I don't think there is a way for the data to make sense outside the context of Twitter.” He explains:  “Anyone using this data must recognize the affordances of the platform itself, and how that shapes the content within.” He views the 140-character limit as a significant obstacle that makes messages brief and “therefore often lacking context or nuance. Tweets are often silly, tongue-in-cheek, aggressive, etc. There's little chance for actual conversation or thoughtful analysis.”

From all this tweeting, a new term, “Twossip,” meaning “Twitter + Gossip,” has been coined. This term specifically calls into question the reliability of information contained by tweets. The German website http://twossip.wordpress.com states that “Twossip is an entertaining collection of news and rumors originating from the German Twitter sphere.” The line between news and rumors is clearly blurred. It reads on: “Our articles have no claim to any kind of veracity and serve only to entertain and divert the reader. Don’t take it personally.”

But if researchers use the information, they are, in a sense, taking it personally. Moreover, we might ask ourselves whether new legal measures need to be put in place to regulate tweets. Cusick asks: “Does saying something about a person and then broadcasting it to all your ‘followers’ constitute slander - or are you just doing a ‘really wide-reaching IM’?” It appears that new cyber laws need to be determined, put in place and followed by legal action. Law schools would need new departments, too.

Before you get into trouble or have your information harvested for research you didn’t agree to, think before you tweet. The responsibility lies within the individual user to reflect on what he or she posts online. As the Twossip site itself advises, “think carefully about whether you want to make that information public. There’s no turning back.”

Digital Bodies

Have you ever wished you could instantly change your body shape, height, skin color or even gender? On the popular virtual world Second Life, wishful thinking becomes virtual reality. The Second Life Marketplace features a massive assortment of shapes, skins, eyes and other body components, from the “Luscious Lanae” shape to “Irresistible Looking Eyelashes” to “Afro Male Ethnic Skin,” all for purchase to create your avatar.

Second Life promotes these choices as a form of self-expression, a chance to “dress up and design a new 3D you.” At first glance, these choices seems to epitomize Princeton English professor Mark Hansen’s 2004 description of an online world that “affords an unprecedented freedom to the digital author who is therewith able to invent herself subject only to the constraints of the on-line medium.” It is a world where users can transcend the limitations of race, gender, class and age which attach themselves to our bodily existence. Users are free to create new identities and perhaps even new forms of community.

Hansen was, however, imagining a text-based digital community, not the dazzling world of YouTube clips, video chatting, Facebook and Second Life, which form the bulk of today’s digital interactions. As these modes make abundantly clear, bodies are very much present online. The new possibilities for bodily re-presentation and even re-creation stir up a haze of ethical dilemmas, but one thing is clear: digital bodies are vitally important.

Elaine Scarry, author of The Body in Pain, has remarked that our bodies are the medium through which we engage with and understand ourselves in the world. Since the Internet and other digital media profoundly restructure how we understand bodily experience, a closer look at our digital bodies can shed new light on emerging understandings of self and society.

What possibilities are there for re-presenting and re-creating our bodies in digital form? What Faustian bargains (recall the legend of Johann Faust who traded his soul with the devil in exchange for power and knowledge) do we unwittingly make as we digitize and upload our bodies?

Opportunities for Bodily Re-Presentation and Re-Creation

Second Life is an extreme example of the detachment from physical reality that digital technologies offer. Your avatar and virtual neighborhood do not need to have any resemblance to real life. On the other end of the spectrum, live video-chatting is perhaps the closest we have gotten to simulating actual physical presence. Even then, you can choose to show only part of yourself. In between the poles lies a spectrum of digital bodies with more or less congruence to real life, from selectively chosen LinkedIn profile photos, to edited video and sound clips, to snapshots from 10 years ago that “pass” for our online presence today.

There is also pure text which, while a narrow medium, can still be used to constitute digital bodies. Rodney Jones, for example, studied how users of online gay chat rooms moved from text-based chats to multi-modal forms of communication. Users began interaction by writing their bodies into digital existence, giving statistics such as “22, 173 cm, 136 lbs” or using descriptors such as “stocky fit tanned smooth.” Users relied on their encounters with text-based digital bodies to determine whether to transition into image-based interactions.

What remains consistent across all these digital media is the greater control users have in how they represent their bodies. Sociologist Erving Goffman observed that social interactions involve information that is “given” – intentional – and “given off” – unintentional. Because information channels are fewer and narrower online than in face-to-face interaction, users can focus their attention on carefully controlling what gets sent through these channels. We upload the most flattering pictures of ourselves to Facebook and carefully tailor self-descriptions on profile pages, for example.

But even as aspects of digital media allow users more leeway to control what is “given” about our bodies, these same functions also set the stage for the viral spread of information that we did not intend, exponentially widening the scope of what could be “given off.” Former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s “sexting scandal” is a sobering example of “sharing” functions gone awry. Even though Weiner intentionally shared with several women over Twitter and Facebook the images which led to his downfall, the multiplying effect of social media broadcast his digital body to a much larger audience than he intended.

In other cases, we don’t even generate our own digital bodies. It’s been popular lately among my friends to post funny and rather embarrassing photos from high school on Facebook. These images of me posing as a Charlie’s Angel or baring my teeth for a frightening smile make their rounds long before I have a chance to distance myself from a digital body that was not my choice to upload by removing the tag or asking the photo to be taken down.

Ironically, even as digital technologies give us more control of how our bodies come across, in some ways we are left with less control, less privacy and less authorship than we anticipated.

Digital Bodies Give

As with any Faustian bargain, the opportunities for bodily re-presentation and re-creation are a give and take. The freedom to selectively represent our bodies and in some cases completely bypass any grounding in physical reality can sometimes be harmful. In other cases, it can be beneficial.

Anthropologist Denise Carter documents that many inhabitants of the virtual world “Cybercity” (a pseudonym) celebrated the absence of physical bodies, describing their online relationships as more pure and intimate than those in real life. One user remarked, “Just being online eliminates the physical entanglement that comes with having the extra physical side to deal with . . . we want to be with each other for who we are not what we look like.” For this user and others like her, digital technology provides an opportunity to be more authentic and true to oneself.

If physical bodies put individuals at some disadvantage (namely, being discriminated based on race, sex, age, or appearance), the absence of bodies in the digital realm might be a boon not just for building friendships, but also for other online interactions, such as job searching, making business deals or dating.

Escaping the constraints of physical appearance along with all the snap judgments that go along with them could also benefit society at large. If we could encounter each other outside of the stereotypical categories such as “woman,” “Black” or “teenager,” in which our physical bodies are immediately slotted, perhaps social barriers could be bridged and new solutions to pressing social issues could emerge.

Digital Bodies Take Away

While some social progress may be happening online, in many cases stereotypes are simply being reinforced. Many of today’s digital interactions start with images, not with text. On dating websites, a quick glance at a photo determines whether a match-seeker will pursue further interaction. On the professional network LinkedIn, uploading a profile photo is crucial to establishing credibility, but at the same time makes a job seeker vulnerable to discrimination based on their race, gender, age, or appearance.

In a digital sphere where image is indeed everything, substantial content that engages both the mind and heart takes the back seat to visual displays which impress the eyes. When this is the case, our digital bodies might lead not to deeper connection with other people, but to disconnection from and exploitation of them.

Pornography and online sexual predation are extreme examples of how the distance between physical and virtual reality creates dangerous gaps into which many vulnerable people fall. Because of the computer-mediated distance and anonymity, people don’t have to behave the same way they do online as offline.

Whereas in a face-to-face encounter, you see another person’s body at the same time as you are seen, online interactions often lack that reciprocal quality. You can be seen without seeing back, and you can see other bodies, sometimes intimately, without being seen. This leaves many feeling exposed and vulnerable. Georg Simmel’s insight that, “The eye has a uniquely sociological function. The union and interaction of individuals is based upon mutual glances” doesn’t apply in a digital world where glances often lack a response.

In these one-way glances, the social fabric deteriorates. While being more “connected” through digital pathways, we can experience greater distance from each other. Furthermore, as we create digital bodies which are incongruent with our physical selves or act online in ways that we would never act in our physical bodies, we also experience internal disconnection, a fragmentation of the self.

Digital Bodies as a Reflection of Self and Society

So was the Faustian bargain worth it? Have we gained more than we lost? Perhaps it is still too early to tell. A few things can be noted, however, regarding how our digital bodies are reshaping our understandings of self and society.

Digital bodies lead to a greater tolerance for plurality. As we are exposed to more images and have greater capacity to re-present and re-create our digital bodies (as well as our physical bodies), we depart from an understanding that our physical bodies are the singular base upon which our selves are built. We get used to the fact that our bodies and our selves can be tweaked, upgraded and re-made in multiple forms.

The flip side of plurality, however, is duality. If we know that our digital bodies do not always correspond to our physical bodies, which one do we trust? Are we being manipulated, deceived, scammed? “Is this what they really look like, or was this photo taken 15 years earlier and 15 pounds lighter?” becomes a common question. As bases for truth fluctuate, social trust suffers as a result.

Perhaps, though, as earlier bases for discerning authenticity become untenable, we simultaneously develop more sophisticated mechanisms for testing sincerity and authenticity online. Rodney Jones (who researched online gay chat rooms), for example, reports that his informants used clues such as conversational style and even English proficiency to assess their chat partners.

As technology gives us a greater sense of control over the presentation and creation of our digital bodies, this also leads to less tolerance for limitations. If we can recreate our bodies online and leave behind that which lacks visual appeal, why would we be satisfied with our physical bodies (or our physical lives), which are so often messy, unseemly and uncooperative?

Theology professor Beth Felker Jones discusses this repercussion in her article on Pinterest and porn. The Pinterest images of gorgeous bodies (that no one in our everyday circles possesses) and picture-perfect meals (made with ingredients not found in any ordinary kitchen) function much like porn, which “may threaten my enjoyment of and attention to real life,” Felker writes.

Furthermore, being able to so easily alter online what we are not satisfied with in real life can actually stifle creativity rather than foster it. If we can create alternative bodies and alternative worlds instead of working with what we have, we may flee into the realm of fantasy instead of appreciating and creatively making do with what we have been given. This is detrimental not only to our ability to solve real-world problems, but also to our ability to be grateful and content with our limits. As essayist Wendell Berry so eloquently expresses in his poem “The Real Work,” “The impeded stream is the one that sings.”