Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Privacy and Censorship

Facebook, although a successful social media can sometimes violate people’s privacy. In chapter seven of Paul Levinson’s book, New New Media, he addresses the social media, facebook. While facebook provides a fun and adventurous way to look through pictures, it can be a violation of privacy. Any member of Facebook can post a picture of anyone at any time without their consent. There is a difference between posting incriminating pictures of yourself and incriminating pictures of others online. To post incriminating pictures of another person online can do serious damage to their image. Once a picture is posted and tagged with a person in it, the only people who can take that picture down are the people who took it or the people in charge of facebook. Once an incriminating picture of you is posted that won’t be taken down by the people at facebook, all you can do is untag yourself or beg the person who posted it to take it down. Facebook allows photographic evidence of people to be circulated directly to peers by anyone with a camera . There should be some sort of system requesting a person’s permission to post pictures of them on facebook.
On debate of appropriateness I feel completely different. Whether a person is posting pictures of themselves naked or doing something else inappropriate it is really irrelevant. Facebook was originally intended for college students. It used to be that you had to have a college email address in order to get access to facebook, but know anyone can use it. Facebook has already taken down its censorship wall why still try? Children can’t be the reason. If a child has access to facebook, then they have access to any basic search engine which could lead them to things that are way more inappropriate than anything on facebook could ever be. There should be some sort of warning that if someone has inappropriate content on their facebook page then viewer beware, but don’t censor it.

1 comment:

  1. In my view, censorship is more about the government trying to interfere with public communication (or private for that matter). There's also censorship within an organization, for example a network censoring the content of its programs, but that's editing, and they have every right to do that as a private corporation. By the same token, a corporation like Facebook has a reasonable say in what can be posted on its site. But I do understand your point,, and we all have to remember that nothing is entirely private online.

    ReplyDelete