If you haven’t followed the story, USDA official Shirley Sherrod was fired after Fox News* blogger Andrew (not so) Breitbart, in an attempt to make Sherrod appear to be a racist, posted, out of context, a portion of Sherrod’s remarks made at a meeting of the NAACP.
Putting agenda ahead of ethics and fairness, Breitbart has yet to offer a credible apology for the embarrassment and damage he deliberately caused Sherrod’s career. Bill O’Reilly issued a watered down apology, citing additional “questions” raised for him by Sherrod’s remarks.
Personally, it makes me long for the days of Harry Reasoner, Walter Cronkite, Bob Woodward and Dan Rather, newspeople who had only one agenda: tell the story as completely and fairly as possible, with reliable sources and verified facts.
From an ethical standpoint, there is no difference between this story and that of Jason Blair, the former New York Times reporter who, according to the Times itself, “fabricated comments…concocted scenes…(and) selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not.” The parallel is stunning in fact when you consider the use of technology (Blair cropped photos, Breitbart edited videos) to alter the story. Blair, incidentally, resigned after his misdeeds were made public by the Times. Breitbart charges forwards. Truly, we are in a different era.
So why am I attacking “Citizen Journalism”? Sadly, as news outlets find budgets slashed, and fewer people are taking on more work, the old school journalistic system of checks and balances has been dismantled. Breitbart is, for all intents and purposes, a Citizen Journalist who happens to have the use of a very loud media channel, Fox News.* But he is not burdened by editors, fact checkers, legal considerations, or a journalistic canon of ethics.
Breitbart uses the same tools a blogger writing from home, the office, a cafe, or the student union might use. Blogging software is free and intuitive. Most bloggers write and post what they want with no oversight. Anyone can take a digital photo, and edit it in Photoshop or Picnik, upload it to Flickr (or directly to a blog.) Anyone can take a Flip video or cell phone video and do the same.
Social media has given us an environment that has been Photoshopped in multiple dimensions, causing us to call into question the validity of everything we read, see, hear and watch.
With Citizen Journalism, all of the barriers to entry have been removed. Garrison Keillor said, “when everyone’s a writer, no one is.” It could also be said, “when everyone reports the news, no one is a reporter.”
* Andrew Breitbart is not employed by Fox News. I regret the error in reporting that he was.
What are the legal and ethical considerations to consider when launching a social media initiative? Where does a company draw the line between risk and reward when trying to get the most out of its social media marketing or PR?
I’ve had dozens of great conversations about this in the past few weeks, and I have been thinking about a framework for ethical and compliant social media marketing. My intent was to create a simple way of thinking about the legal, ethical, business and reputational aspects of a campaign to evaluate its potential impact, positive and negative, on the company and its brand.
Here’s what it looks like so far (click to see it larger, or download it on a slide below):
Everything a company does represents behavior, and social media communications is no exception. Every behavior signals something about the company, and affects a variety of measures.
Good for Business & Bad for Business
On the top and bottom of the chart are two rectangles representing those things that are either good for business or bad for business. Everything a company does (except perhaps some completely unselfish philanthropic efforts) is either good for the company or bad for the company in a measurable way. Some of these measures include revenue, margin, customer base, subscriber base, etc. Longer term measures may be market capitalization and brand valuation. Every communications effort is either good, that is it improves one of these measures, or bad, in that it does not. Some initiatives can live in both quadrants, because they have some degree of badness, for example, but are good overall.
Ethical & Legal Behavior
At the top left are two circles representing ethical and legal behavior. They do not overlap perfectly, because there is behavior that the law allows which is not ethical, and behavior which is ethical, but not legal. A company or organization should apply both tests to its behavior, but these tests are not enough to give a green light to a program. There are those initiatives which are legal and ethical, but completely ineffectual, and should be abandoned. This is why the legal and ethical circles dip slightly into the area designated Bad for Business.
Unethical Behavior
Though I am sure to get an argument here, unethical behavior is the area that will require the most thought, and probably, the most discussion in your organization. Unethical behavior is represented by a grey circle, which is charitable at best. An ethical organization should not have too much trouble making ethical decisions. Don’t ask whether a campaign will deliver the results, but ask if it deceives people, gives an unfair advantage, or fails to represent the highest ideals of your company.
There are companies in which people know they are stepping across the ethical line, and choose to do so knowingly. This is what’s known as an actuarial decision. Someone has decided the potential rewards outweigh the risks of detection or complaint. While I personally do not endorse this strategy, it happens, so the diagram shows it. In some cases, people aren’t aware they are committing ethical gaffes, or they are unaware of changing custom in a particular area.
Illegal Behavior
Finally, the lower right circle indicates illegal behavior. Doing something against the law, like violating FTC or SEC regulations, is never in the best interests of the company. The risk is too great. Companies that get caught pay a huge price in loss of reputation and, often, revenue. And most companies do get caught.
Like I said, it’s just a framework for discussion, and I hope you find it useful. I am sure many of you have pondered the legal and ethical considerations of a marketing or PR effort. I hope you will share these in the form of a comment.
Since everyone loves slides, I’ve put this graphic on a slide. Please feel free to grab the slide here, use it freely, and if you improve it (I’m no Edward Tufte), please send me an updated version.
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is seeking public comments on its Ethics Code until January 5. If you are involved with any business use of social media (which includes blogging), you should review the code and make suggestions.
For some, the business ethics of social media present a quandary. Organizations like the WOMMA, and federal regulators like the FTC and the EU are trying to make ethical (and legal) behavior easier with codes of ethics, new regulations, etc.
This is a favorite topic of mine, and is covered in my book. (In fact the WOMMA graciously granted me permission to include the full text of their code in the book.) The WOMMA Ethics Code is one of the best out there.
WOMMA is calling its public participation The Living Ethics Project. In a letter to members and friends of the organization, president-elect Paul M. Rand wrote:
“As most of you know, WOMMA has helped shape and lead the charge for effective and meaningful social media disclosure. The recently introduced FTC Guidelines, in fact, make numerous positive references to WOMMA’s Ethics Code.
As a next step in the process, WOMMA is working to finalize explicit best practices for social media disclosure for both marketers and bloggers (like the FTC, WOMMA applies the term “bloggers” to refer to individuals posting online content, whatever the channel).
Please take a moment to review these disclosure guidelines at the Living Ethics blog and provide your comments.
The comments section will remain open until January 5, 2010, and final guidelines will be issued shortly thereafter.”
Technology has made many things possible, and is enabling unethical people to pay as little as one quarter cent per word for their writing. The Internet is the great democratizer. It is also the great enslaver of the disadvantaged and the marginalized.
Freelance writers, often students, mothers, and older people, are the victims of a global conspiracy to pit people against each other to auction their skills and time for as little as possible.
One of the culprits is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MT). Amazon didn’t invent microworking, which is the practice of paying independent contractors by the task instead of by the hour. But they are the first globally recognized company to put their name on the practice, thereby endorsing it and making it an acceptable business practice.
Amazon MT is a service that allows businesses to contract with Amazon to have people perform very brief, discreet operations like manually forwarding an e-mail based on subject matter or moderating blog comments. My son, a student, worked for MT moderating pictures for a social network at the rate of a few pennies each.
ShortTask is another example of a service that brings together businesses and people who want to do microcontract work. In addition to facilitating this process, ShortTask often has questionable tasks like paying for positive product reviews and blog comments, Diggs, Twitter followers, etc.
And last night, someone tweeted a link to Article Slash, which had this posting:
“Hi, I need a group of writers or writing teams who can deliver 20-30 articles of 300 words every day. Payout will be made everyday through paypal.. 0.75$ for every 300 word article.”
Seventy-five cents per article! That’s .0025 per word, one quarter of a penny! If you could write 1200 words per hour (I’m a professional writer and I can’t), you could make $3 an hour doing this.
Our current minimum wage in California is $8, and the federal minimum is $7.25. As bad as that is, there are millions of Californians who would think they had died and gone to heaven to get $8 an hour. The rate at which people work and the quality expected by buyers varies, but the wages offered by these services, like the 75-cent, 300-word article, are equivalent to under $2 an hour. The last time the federal minimum wage was below $2 was in 1974.
Both California state and federal law require* that pieceworkers be paid a rate that is equal to or more than minimum wage, except for students and “new learners” (people who have never done the job before) who are paid at 85% of the minimum wage. Of course this is for regular employees, not contractors.
Some of the inevitable byproducts of this trend are:
Devaluation of good writing, research and analysis
Illiteracy
Theft of editorial content
Microworking is an area in which the law has not caught up with technology and common practice. And the marketplace for these services is mostly underground, so the average person isn’t aware of it or upset by it. The operators of sites like Article Slash and ShortTask may argue that they are merely facilitators, and not responsible for the behavior of their users.
Ours is supposedly a free market economy, but we also have checks and balances so that everyone from the soup kitchen to the boardroom is protected from abuse. As the economic recovery slowly ticks up, one can only hope that supply and demand moderate the wages for microworkers so they are fairly paid for their effort and intellect. Unfortunately, the practices, which may have been made necessary by the downturn, will be status quo for some companies who will be unable to resist the appeal of continued lower operating costs.
* This is based on my research and interpretation of government documents. I am not an attorney and could be wrong about this.
You’re at a conference, the wifi is good, and you’re excited about live tweeting the next speaker. But have you ever wondered whether it’s “OK” to copy and publish someone else’s words and ideas? If you were at the movie theater, neither the studio nor the theater operator would permit you to videotape portions of the movie to post on your blog. On the other hand, the art of critical commentary goes back to at least Shakespeare’s time, so it’s definitely established both in common practice and in the law that reproducing information, even copyrighted information, is acceptable under certain circumstances.
Setting aside issues of whether the practice is actually useful, and whether it is distracting to the speaker and to others in attendance, live tweeting and live blogging of conferences, events and webcasts raises legal and ethical issues. Producers of webcasts and live events often charge admission for these, and they may include copyrighted material. Speakers may also have copyrighted their presentations, or may (in my case) quote substantial portions of a copyrighted book or other work. These words and ideas are essentially products that are sold commercially, and the owners have certain rights to them.
On the other hand, the law does permit reproduction of portions of copyrighted material. I have two biases that affect my opinions on this issue, but I think they balance each other. I have a degree in journalism so I appreciate the need for journalists to incorporate information from third parties in their works. As the author of a book, I also understand the need for copyright protections for commercial content.
The best guidance for whether live blogging and live tweeting is acceptable comes from the Fair Use provision of U.S. copyright law, which allows a certain percentage of a copyrighted work to be reproduced for purposes such as a review of a book or theatrical play. Factors that affect whether reproduction of a copyrighted work is fair use are:
“The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
The nature of the copyrighted work
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work
The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission.”
In other words, fair use is in the eyes of the beholder. The government will not rule on what is or isn’t fair use, leaving it the judgment of the individual, and in some cases, the courts to make the ultimate determination.
Despite the federal government’s unwillingness to establish numerical guidelines for fair use, many organizations have set their own limits. The University of California for example, in its Policy on the Reproduction of Copyrighted Materials for Teaching and Research, permits teachers to reproduce for classroom use “either a complete article, story or essay of less than 2,500 words or an excerpt of not more than 2,500 words from any prose work.” The policy was written in 1986, long before blogging and tweeting. Today, 2500 words is quite substantial and I think excessive. The UC policy also reminds teachers that if they exceed fair use limits they “can subject the one making unauthorized copies and the University to severe penalties.” The UC policy pertains to photocopying, not live events, but it does give some ideas of how to apply fair use. (I did not find a UC policy covering other fair use guidelines.)
Last year, the Associated Press announced it would “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.”
A practical approach is to simply ask yourself, does the speaker want his or her work reproduced and distributed free of charge? Some may, some may not. The right, and the ability, to freely share information is such a cornerstone of Web 2.0, that I think most conference organizers and speakers in the Web 2.0/social media sphere are happy to have their talks live tweeted and live blogged. Either practice is more like reporting than reproduction, and would involve the “copying” of relatively small percentages of the content.
Most speakers make their slides and speaker’s notes available to attendees and these are freely distributed. I do the same, and I don’t care if my talks are reproduced in full, as long as there is attribution. And if someone can benefit from the information, I am happy for them to have it. Who knows — it could lead someone to buy my book or choose to engage my company.
My publisher generally allows me to grant permission to people who request the right to reproduce content from my book as long as the material constitutes less than 10% of the book. It is unlikely that someone live tweeting one of my talks could approach that 140 characters at a time, or even that a blogger could do so.
In one recent case, a blogger and researcher was criticized for live blogging a scientific meeting because the organizers felt he should have “abide(d) by the rules governing professional journalists attending the conference.” These rules include the requirement that journalists inform conference organizers in advance of their intentions.
Another interesting issue journalists are contending with is how Fair Use applies to information published on Twitter. Last month, Julie Posetti wrote a piece on the PBS MediaShift blog, Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter. She believes that anything that appears on Twitter is “fair game”:
“Although social media etiquette may not recognize a journalist’s right to report any material published openly, the reality is that open Twitter accounts are a matter of permanent public record and fair game for journalists. While attribution is vital and it might be polite (but not necessary) to seek the approval of a Twitterer to quote them, I don’t see anything unethical about using tweets in mainstream news coverage.”
She goes on to say, however that she feels private Twitter accounts, those requiring owner approval of subscription requests, are off-the-record and not fair game. I disagree with her take that simply because something is published it is therefore a matter of public record and fair game. This would probably apply to quoting someone in a story, but not to reproducing material that might be copyrighted. Just because a tweet is only 140 characters does not remove it from the domain of copyrighted material. Multiple tweets could be used to convey an article, or a Twitter-based webcast. A journalist could quote a portion under Fair Use, but could not reproduce something in its entirety.
This also points out one of the weak links in the integrity of information in the Web 2.0 world. Bloggers and tweeters are NOT professional journalists. They don’t have training in ethical practices in areas like attribution and when and how to quote a source.
I generally hold that new media does not require new ethics, and I think this is largely the case in live tweeting/live blogging a presentation or webcast. Given that these practices don’t generally involve reproduction of any significant portion of the entire “work,” both common practice and the law seem to permit this.
Do you live tweet conferences and web casts? Do you have any personal guidelines you follow, or are you aware of any guidelines established by your company or organization?
Tags: sherrod, breitbart, jason blair, citizen journalism
