By David McMahon, The Straits Times, 13 Oct 2012
SOCIAL media has a Frankenstein factor. Use it well, you are safe. Overstep the mark, you pay the price. It is a microcosm of life itself. With freedom comes responsibility. Embrace the opportunity to e-publish, by all means. But when you transgress, prepare for the instant backlash.
When you post, consider three simple factors.
- One, you are publishing across international jurisdictions.
- Two, you must self-censor or face the consequences.
- Three, an apology is no defence.
Like an online game of snakes and ladders, you can descend dramatically from a position of relative influence to the vipers' pit in an instant.
Recent indiscretions by Ms Amy Cheong, French fashion designer Thierry Gillier, racing driver Lewis Hamilton and footballer Ashley Cole prove how old, familiar warning signs were ignored.
Backlash in the highly visible world of social media, where everyone is only a hashtag or a link away, is unavoidable. Mr Gillier's remark about Chinese tourists not being welcome at his new hotel was actually made in an interview, not on social media. But the uproar was so swift that he apologised to his "friends from China".
Ms Amy Cheong's race-related, expletive-laced remarks cost her a high-profile job and earned her a rebuke from the Prime Minister.
Mr Hamilton tweeted a snide remark about teammate Jenson Button allegedly unfollowing him - and then discovered to his chagrin that Mr Button had never followed him to start with. Mr Cole posted an expletive-laced description of the Football Association that prompted Prince William to tell him: "If you continue to be a naughty boy, they'll take your Twitter account off you."
Digital media literacy is not simply the ability to post. It is about being able to discern what not to post.
I heartily endorse the democratisation of international publishing. We must all applaud the fact that a person in a little-known town can potentially wield just as much influence as a media superpower. Is there anyone who does not recognise the fact that social media brings global power and reach to the humblest citizens who use Facebook, Twitter or blogs?
Was there not a cold shiver through Washington last year on the night of the Osama bin Laden raid when Mr Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant in Abbottabad, tweeted the first hint of the mission? He wrote: "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1am."
As a career journalist, I welcome the fact that traditional media is forced to compete with untrained news-breakers using smartphones. The fact that the first picture of the US Airways jet in the Hudson River was posted on Twitter in 2009 shows just how much power is wielded by "citizen journalists".
But with it comes the allied onus of liability. It is not just enough to publish. It is equally crucial to publish responsibly, accurately and with respect to social mores as well as local and international laws.
Globally, big business embraced social media because of its immediacy, its reach and the not-inconsiderable recognition that it is free advertising.
Yet while they embraced that widening of reach across borders, they set their own boundaries in the form of social media policies. They reinforced the need to be prudent.
For private netizens, it was not always this way. In my newbie days as a blogger in 2007, before I was cited as one of Google's "blogs of note" and earned 9,000 page views a day, I was regularly astounded by the carefree manner in which bloggers denigrated their bosses, colleagues, the organisations that employed them and even, sometimes, family members.
A far more experienced United States blogger, aware that I am a journalist, once proudly asked me to read his most recent post. I was appalled. In an expletive-laced update, he had ridiculed an ongoing court case, criticised the US legal system and defamed the presiding judge. My advice was quick and simple: remove the post. He did - and thanked me profusely for pointing out how he had crossed the line.
Fortunately, I was taught responsible standards as a teenager in nothing more significant than my school's monthly magazine, Sursum Corda. That learning curve continued through my cadetship as a junior reporter.
There were three golden rules.
- Get the facts right.
- Check your transcripts or recordings to ensure accuracy.
- And make sure you stay within legal boundaries.
There is a great line in The Coca- Cola Company's comprehensive social media policy. It basically says, if in doubt, do not post.
There is a lesson in that for us all.
The writer is a copyeditor with The Straits Times.
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