Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Flickering Ethics at Flickr: On the Ethics of Enforcement
Posted by Find Insurance Online at 2:06 AMThe New York Times has an interesting piece on the ethics involved in providing a social media service for the public. The article describes how “(t)wo days after using Flickr to display photos of police officers from Egypt’s feared state security force, Hossam el-Hamalawy watched in disbelief as they vanished, one by one, from the popular social networking site, which he had been using since 2008. ‘I thought I was being hacked,’ said Mr. el-Hamalawy, a prominent Egyptian blogger and human rights activist who had uploaded the headshots of the police from CDs found by activists early this month at the State Security Police headquarters in Nasr City. He later learned . . . that the photos had been removed because he did not take the images himself, a violation of the site’s . . . rules. ‘That is totally ludicrous,’ he said. ‘Flickr is full of accounts with photos that people did not take themselves.’” Astonishingly, Ebele Okobi-Harris, the director of the business and human rights program at Yahoo, which owns Flickr, “acknowledged el-Hamalawy was correct in noting that Flickr’s . . . rules are not applied consistently.” To be sure, Harris was firm on the purpose of Flickr: “Flickr was set up . . . for people who love photography to share their photographs. In this particular case, we had someone who wanted to use Flickr, not for photographs that he took, but for photographs that he found somewhere else. The community rules are about sharing your own content. You can’t upload photos that are not your own.” So even if uploading another’s picture does not violate copyright law, it is still extrinsic to Flickr.
The unfairness identified by el-Hamalawy has to do with the inconsistency in enforcement by Flickr employees. This raises the question: what if it is virtually impossible to enforce a rule? Should the “easy cases” be enforced anyway? From an ethical standpoint, Flickr staff should enforce the policy across the board or not at all. If the rule is practically unenforceable except in rather obvious cases, selective enforcement is still unethical. Aside from the matter of enforcement, it may be asked whether people uploading photos from the public domain simply to show them is all that bad, especially as it goes on anyway. In fact, “simply to show them” is problematic as a viable constraint because motive is a difficult thing to assess. This opens the door to the motive of a protester such as el-Hamalawy. His motive in displaying the pictures of security agents was not simply to show them, as if they had aesthetic value. Here motive does seem to go beyond a site set up to show photos, but enforcement is once again the problem.
I think Facebook would have been a more suitable site for el-Hamalawy’s photos of the security agents; such mug shots would fit better on a “wall” than at a site oriented simply to displaying photos. Even so, Flickr ought not presume to judge motives from the photos themselves, so the staff would be better off with a policy simply stating that the users alone are responsible for the content that they upload. For otherwise, Flickr becomes more than a conduit (in which case the company would be liable for any content uploaded by users because the assumption is that the staff are monitoring the content). Perhaps within Flickr there could be a special area reserved for the users’ own work—assuming adequate and consistent enforcement, of course.
Click to add a Question or Comment (or View Posted Comments) on ethics at Flickr as social media.
Source:
Source:
Jennifer Preston, “Ethical Quandary for Social Sites,” NYT, March 26, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/business/media/28social.html?_r=2&hp
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Search
0 comments:
Post a Comment