I once taught college classes in journalism law, so I’m pretty familiar with things you can do with “pen and paper” that can get you in trouble.
I use that phrase in quotes kind of metaphorically, because we all know that fewer of us really use the old time-consuming tools of the writing trade any more.
Instead, we have smart phones or computers that can churn out reams of comment and information in the matter of seconds, which can be good and bad.
It’s the latter that I’m focusing on here.
Social media has put the tools of mass communication in the hands of, well, just about everyone. Anybody can now be a “reporter,” as is obvious when I go to a house fire or a crash and I see a bunch of people standing by with their cellphones, broadcasting away. They’re in the spotlight now.
It’s not all bad, but it’s not all good, either.
A recent situation in Sweet Home presents a good illustration of what can go wrong when people fire away without any guardrails.
As you may have read in last week’s paper (if you hadn’t already gotten a “breaking” news flash online), the Sweet Home School District issued an announcement to parents of Oak Heights Elementary School students that an interim principal would be stepping in while Principal Todd Barrett was “away.”
This launched a barrage of social media posts filled with unsubstantiated assertions, innuendo and conjecture, along with comments from individuals purportedly in the know.
Sweet Home schools Supt. Terry Martin in a later post about the situation in the district, asked the public to tone down the babble on social media, specifically “rumors and unverified information.”
The story we published online and in the newspaper was much less exciting because we decided to stick solely with what the district could confirm. There was a lot that they couldn’t say. It was a personnel issue, albeit involving an important district official, but the rules are the same as they are for anyone else being “investigated” in an employment context. For the district to actually say anything other than what it did could very well be legal suicide.
And that raises another question: How much do we, the public, really need to know at this point? If wrong has been done, lives will be ruined – and it’s not the people taking potshots from the sidelines. We’ll be keeping our eye on this situation.
Meanwhile, let’s talk about guardrails. Journalism students who are well-taught always learn about the law of defamation. Put simply, defamation is a false statement that damages someone’s reputation – published, which can be libel, or spoken, which can be slander.
If I make a factual statement about someone, such as “they did such-and-such,” and it turns out that they did not do such-and-such, that is a false statement. Even if I’m just thinking out loud and I throw that out there, it could be a defamatory statement.
Any of this sound familiar? Sure, we see it constantly in the cesspool – which is how I heard a prominent local figure recently describe the nature of many local social media posts.
One thing that has surprised me over the past years is that more defamation suits have not been filed in connection with online posts or broadcasts.
If information posted on social media is truthful and accurate, even if it’s not nice, it’s not necessarily a legal problem. But getting one detail wrong, particularly out of spite or just being careless, could literally get you sued.
The biggest “protection” that posters have is that it’s costly and often complicated to sue and win a defamation suit. But it wouldn’t surprise me if, one day, perpetrators of false accusations or malicious innuendo could find themselves paying up.
I don’t want to sound snotty here, but there are reasons why we want our journalists trained. They have to be more than simply competent writers; they need to know how to conduct themselves as writers as well.
Let me introduce an even greater concern by saying that I have great appreciation for the First Amendment, on many levels. But as every junior high school student should know, with freedom comes responsibility. It’s hard to think that we could ever lose freedoms provided us by the Bill of Rights, but if you think back even a few years to COVID, well, some of those freedoms suddenly didn’t seem quite as invincible, as inviolable.
Legislators have an uncanny ability to find ways to rein in those who they consider are out of line – or that they can control.
When I see and hear people asserting things that I know to be factually inaccurate if not absolutely false in social media posts or broadcasts, I wonder how far this is going to go. Could they get sued for libel? Could the level of incivility and hostility reach the point where legislators and judges find ways to curtail our ability to say what we think?
We’re surrounded by increasing crudeness, people saying things that even a generation or two ago would never have been uttered out loud, in public. Yet now they’re being uttered in print, letters or digital recordings that, even when deleted, don’t necessarily go away.
In today’s issue we have a story, written by me, about abuse of freedoms that are occurring in the woods around Sweet Home, people taking their privileges for granted to the point that, frankly, if they go too far, they may lose them. We all could.
That’s my fear here. Social media can be a great experience, but a lot of times it’s not. Mark Zuckerberg might assert that his original goal in creating Facebook was to “ accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.” Well, he made it more open and connected, but a lot of times it’s not in a nice way. And then, of course, there are the lawsuits that Meta is losing. But that’s another issue.
Fact is, we live in a society where a lot of people are their own god and nobody tells them what to do, so they exercise their right to grab the spotlight and tell everybody what they know, regardless of whether it’s appropriate. Freedom requires responsibility, and in most cases it’s better for everyone if we err on the side of the latter.