Locating the You in YouTube and the Me in MySpace

What rules should reporters observe when gleaning personal information from social networking sites? Are we truly who we say we are, online? What happens when there's a gap between the Web and the truth?

Posted: 2007-03-05

A while back, there was some controversy over LA Times reporters using Facebook to gather information about Holly Ashcraft, the USC student who is being arraigned next week for allegedly dumping her newborn in a garbage dumpster.

The question becomes: should we use the self-reported details that people--most often young people--post on their own social networking sites for journalistic articles?

Some would say no--that the gap between "online persona" and actual person is too wide. The above Trojan article notes that often Facebook and mySpace profiles have referenced to drugs, alcohol or sex that "may not reflect the person."

This is really a post-modern question at its heart--where do we locate identity? In what a person says to others? In what they do? In how they define themselves? And to whom are they speaking?

This is nothing new--we have always been different people to our parents, our teachers, our employers and our friends--so which identity is more true than another?

As a reporter, there must be special caution with regards to behavior and statements made on the Web. The Internet is still a realm of pseudo-behavior, where the stealing of music files seems categorically different to some than the stealing of a CD from a retail store.

Are posters creating avatar characters, roles that they play virtually, on their social networking sites? If so, what legal and factual bearing do these fictional facsimiles have on the actual person?

Young people have always struggled with self-definition--it's a necessary part of growing up. But what happens now that's it's on the Web for all to see. It's one thing to say and do certain things experimentally as a kid. It's quite another to say and do things experimentally and leave a permanent text and video record for journalists, law enforcement and the world to have access to.

Responses:

From Jessica Roberts on March 6, 2007 at 12:44 PM

I think there's a tendency when we're faced with new technology to try to re-write the book on good journalism, when in fact we already know everything we need to know about how to handle these questions. Dealing with the kind of information we find on YouTube and MySpace is no different. Good reporting has always meant finding confirmation of information given to a reporter by any source. If someone says something we find questionable, we try to find out if another source can confirm or deny it. Reporters are often faced with questions of false self-identification -- politicians, public officials with something to hide, run-of-the-mill liars -- and have do what they can to discover what they find to be closest to the truth in context.
If a teenager's MySpace page features a lot of references to drugs and Kurt Cobain, it may not warrant mentioning, but those are decisions made by reporters anyway. If you find out the subject of your story is a heavy drinker, but the story is about modern art, it may not be appropriate or helpful -- it doesn't add to the story or help elucidate something about the story. On the other hand, if the subject is a heavy drinker charged with a DUI, it may indeed help clarify something for the reader. Not all judgments are as simple as modern art vs. drunken driving, but journalism is full of those kinds of calls.
Faced with new technology, or new ways of presenting information, I think we ask the same questions and try to make the same judgments.

From Anna Haynes on March 6, 2007 at 6:05 PM

What about giving readers a link to the person's youtube/myspace info?
This seems appalling, but I'm guessing it's how the game of ethical musical chairs will eventually settle out.
(Some readers will want the info, and if it's not in the article, the demand side _will_ end up supplying itself)

From Robert Niles on March 7, 2007 at 11:40 AM

With Myspace, et al, people can publish to the world private personas that in the past they revealed only to close friends. Unfortunately, many of these people do not realize that these online personas *are* available to the world, and not just to their invited Myspace friends. (Yes, Myspace and YouTube, to cite the two examples, allow users to restrict access to posted information, but many users fail to do that.)

Young people need to learn that the information they post to the Web can be seen by the world at large, including employers, parents, voters and clients. If they wish to publish private personas to friends via the Web, they need to learn how to do so in a way that restricts access to that information to those invited friends.

Yet, at the same time, journalists need better new media literacy as well. We need to recognize that what one sees on many Myspace and Facebook profiles is just one, carefully edited yet often intentionally incomplete slice of a person's true self. Often, these profiles are written to conform to what a person sees as his or her friends' social expectation of that person, and not as a reflection of how that person sees himself or herself. A social networking profile is one source into a person's being that needs to be balanced by the presence of other sources.

From Robert Niles on March 9, 2007 at 11:46 AM

One more example, again from here at USC.

The Daily Trojan reported yesterday on a Facebook group started by several USC football players. The players named their group "White Nation," after a nickname that an African-American assistant football coach gave to the Caucasian players.

The group's page included racially inflammatory text and images, as reported by the Trojan and the LA Times, which picked up the story this morning.

The consensus seems to be that the group probably is not racist, but that the students at the very least didn't understand the cultural significance of their words and images, and didn't understand how their publication would offend others.

Again, I think this illustrates how students view Facebook, etc. as a medium of communication for people within a closed social group, and fail to understand that it is also a global public publishing platform.

While I hope that journalists will be sensitive to young people's ignorance (however wrong and ill-advised it may be) and not exploit it for a story, in this case, USC football players are limited public figures (and some might be general public figures), and fair game for a higher level of scrutiny. And the adult coach who gave his players a racially charged nickname is absolutely fair game for criticism.