3.6 Context #1: Ethical Blogging

Chapter 18 (Media 1) starts by looking at the contrasts between “old media” (newspapers, radio and television) and “new media” (internet, social media). One such contrast relates to the number of people who can be potential sources of messages. Going back a few hundred years, only a few people had access to printing presses, which meant that only a small minority of people ever got to see their opinions appear in print. As the newspaper industry grew over time, newspaper moguls became powerful people who ran organizations with large staffs; when radio and television came along, these organizations kept growing.

In addition to reporters, writers, editors, photographers, and on-air anchors, they had plenty of lawyers on staff. Sometimes those lawyers got involved in free speech cases that went all the way to the Supreme Court, and sometimes their work was focused on defamation cases. Naming names is central to reporting the news, but it’s inevitable that someone becomes unhappy about seeing their name in print and accuses you of telling lies about them. Originally, if someone spoke lies about you out loud, that was “slander,” and if they wrote it down, that was “libel,” but nowadays the preferred term is “defamation,” which covers all channels of communication. How did those defamation cases turn out? Sometimes in favor of the plaintiff (the person who accused the news organization of defaming them), sometimes in favor of the news organization defendant. In the early 2020s, some of the largest civil verdicts in the U.S. were defamation verdicts, with jury awards in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Defamation law used to rest on the general assumption that, in order to ruin someone’s life by spreading harmful lies about them, you had to be a large organization, or perhaps a wealthy individual. Those were the only people who had the opportunity to communicate through mass channels, and while “little people” might spread vicious gossip over the back fence or to their friends, it couldn’t spread very far.

The internet, on the other hand, has given everyone the potential to be a source of mass media messages, at least theoretically. Some people have gained followings that rival the audiences for old media, reaching millions of people from their basement or living room, and doing so alone or with a very small staff. Does that staff include lawyers, or anyone who is even vaguely familiar with defamation law? Perhaps not. The potential to defame people has grown exponentially, but the number of people who understand the law has probably not kept up. If you are in the blogging or vlogging game already, or want to be, it’s time to read up on the law yourself and, if you can afford one, talk to a defamation attorney before a crisis arises.

When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, many people went back and watched a prescient movie about pandemics, 2011’s Contagion. The non-human villain in that story is a virus, but the worst human villain is clearly the blogger Alan Krumwiede (played by Jude Law), who deliberately spreads falsehoods about the disease, attacks the reputation of scientists, and fakes illness and recovery in order to promote an ineffective herbal remedy (from which he makes millions of dollars in profit). Eventually he is arrested by the Department of Homeland Security, but while he’s in the interrogation room, he relies on the support of his 12 million followers, who bail him out. Due to his online popularity, he in some ways has more power than the DHS, even though he is just one man with a social media channel. But the DHS hint that he will be hit with a staggering volley of lawsuits.

Even apart from the threat of being sued, if you want to be an ethical blogger, there are questions worth pondering about that career:

If you consider yourself a warrior “fighting the good fight” by revealing wrongdoers, are you sure you’re right about the nature of the wrongdoing? Do you have the facts straight, and if you think you do, how do you know? Instead of deciding that someone is evil and using whatever material you can to prove your point, do you truly understand the situation? Did you make reasonable efforts to communicate with the person you want to talk about in your blog?

If you feel justified in attacking someone because you believe they are a bully, are you acting bully-like yourself? Think of the “E” in TARES (the Equity criteria): is this a level playing field?

If you are saying positive things about a person or product, do you have an ethical responsibility to reveal conflicts of interest or motives for what you are saying? Are you telling “the whole truth,” or is there an issue with lies of omission?

If you feature your children in your social media postings, could this be harming them in the short or long term?

Are you trying a little too hard to portray your “fabulous life”? Some people have noted that one effect of social media is the feeling that everyone is having more fun than you are: they have more friends, go to more fantastic places, and seem to experience non-stop excitement. This is only natural, since visits to beautiful places and socializing with friends are exactly the kinds of things people post about, but if it leaves others feeling lonely or left out, is it worth it? Another effect is impossible beauty standards, thanks in part to image filters and programs like Photoshop, that result in body image issues for groups like adolescent girls: no matter how attractive a person is, a few minutes on social media will make them feel like there are always more beautiful people out there. The ethical questions, then, are: are you trying to generate jealousy? Are you willing to reveal the less-than-perfect sides of your life as well? Are you contributing to impossible beauty standards?