1. Facebook is not obliged towards any legal duty in terms of rescuing crime victim but if any people over Facebook get to know about certain illegal activity or an unethical practice, he or she should immediately report to the nearest law body. Facebook is a platform where people could share their thoughts, pictures, videos, etc. to their friends across the globe and it could also be seen by the whole world. Along with this, people could stay in connect with their friends, family and other people irrespective to the distance, caste or religion. For example, if a person posts an update on Facebook stating that he/she is committing suicide, then it is the moral duty of Facebook to immediately notify to the law enforcement in order to take strict action against the particular individual along with taking measures to save him/her.
Facebook has now introduced various features through which people could mark them safe or in danger while any natural calamity takes place. This helps the government bodies to area which immediately requires appropriate precautionary measures for saving people in danger. Thus, it could be said that Facebook is not obliged by law in terms of rescuing a crime victim but on the other hand, Facebook is responsible to share information regarding any illegal or unethical activity to the law enforcement bodies (Lipschultz, 2014).
2. The three ways through which social media platforms could be more protective are:
- Changing passwords time to time
- Immediate report to help centre if account has been hacked
- Setting alerts so that if an unauthorised person tries to login some other person’s account, owner of the account could get notification (Friend & Singer, 2015).
In terms of being protective, social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. could simply follow code of conducts in order to review the type of content which is being shared over social media platforms. For example, Facebook has adopted various measures such as secure browsing, encryption of messages and posts and the right to report spam to other’s post are certain effective measures through which Facebook has secure their user’s account.
3. Following are two measures which Facebook and other social media platforms should adopt in order to help to prevent acts of violence from being broadcasted are:
- Human moderators
- Third-party fact hackers
With the help of these measures, social media platforms would easily be able to review the content shared by public before it could be broadcasted for general public. Social media platforms are the major sources through which information flows from one medium to another and imposition of restrictions under which content will be reviewed before being broadcasted will help in terms of enhancing the effectiveness of the social media platforms. Recently, 30 organizations including Facebook were being found victim of use of personal data of users for political and commercial purposes. When a user enters its personal information and data to create an account to stay in touch with their friends, family members, etc. on social media, he/she builds certain level of trust which assures that user’s data will not be misused and if it happens for some other purposes, it affects both organizational goodwill amongst the users as well as its brand image in the international market. With regards to this case, CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg requires to face huge list of questions from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) (Primack, et. al., 2017).
4. Facebook has recently appointed former TV news journalist Campbell Brown for the role of developing different approach of editing, filtering news and curating. Apart from these efforts, some critiques want that Facebook should do more like appointing chief ethics officer. This officer will control and inform internal conversations around pressing political and social issues. It has been suggested to Facebook that ethics officers could help the company to deal with complex world where technology and humans collide but still there is cache to find what is wrong and what is right. Thus, social media platforms are not required to appoint ethics officers as these platforms are for staying connected with each other where applying filters is not necessary (Zhang & Gupta, 2016).
5. In order to encourage ethical use of Facebook, it is necessary to spread awareness amongst the users regarding the sharing of information. Apart from this, Facebook provide equal rights to its users in terms of analysing data and if they found that data unethical or violent, other users could immediately report it as spam (Trottier, 2015). With regards to this, Facebook could adopt following two ways for encouraging its users towards ethical usage of information:
- Automation to catch fake new information and accounts, foreign interference, and to increase transparency in sharing political news.
- Abiding code of conducts is another effective measure for the organization to encourage users towards ethical use of social media platform (Ngai, Tao & Moon, 2015).
References:
Friend, C. and Singer, J., 2015. Online Journalism Ethics: Traditions and Transitions: Traditions and Transitions. Routledge.
Lipschultz, J.H., 2014. Social media communication: Concepts, practices, data, law and ethics. Routledge.
Ngai, E.W., Tao, S.S. and Moon, K.K., 2015. Social media research: Theories, constructs, and conceptual frameworks. International Journal of Information Management, 35(1), pp.33-44.
Primack, B.A., Shensa, A., Sidani, J.E., Whaite, E.O., yi Lin, L., Rosen, D., Colditz, J.B., Radovic, A. and Miller, E., 2017. Social media use and perceived social isolation among young adults in the US. American journal of preventive medicine, 53(1), pp.1-8.
Trottier, D., 2015. Coming to terms with social media monitoring: Uptake and early assessment. Crime, Media, Culture, 11(3), pp.317-333.
Zhang, Z. and Gupta, B.B., 2016. Social media security and trustworthiness: overview and new direction. Future Generation Computer Systems.
