The Independent hadn’t yet drawn up guidelines for navigating social networks. A brave new world for journalism, the Internet blurred the lines between public and private, and allowed reporters to access personal information with unprecedented ease. As the BBC’s Alfred Hermida said about social networks: “This content is both private and public at the same time. It is private in the sense that it was intended for a specific audience of friends. But it is also publicly available online. This is a new ethical area for journalists.” [1]

That did not mean there were no rules: general ethical principles applied. It was universally accepted, for example, that journalists should try to minimize harm to tangential sources and subjects. They were also supposed to weigh the news value of a story relative to the potential harm to sources and subjects.

A few major news organizations had made efforts to set standards for reporters’ online behavior. In spring 2009, both the New York Times and Dow Jones & Co. had issued guidelines for using social networks. But these focused on how journalists who were themselves members of social media networks could avoid compromising their credibility. The primary concern of these organizations, it seemed, was that journalists might reveal too much information in social networks, or write something on a personal page that would cast doubt on their professional impartiality. For example, the Times said, “If you have or are getting a Facebook page, leave blank the section that asks about your political views…” [2]

The documents included only limited guidance on approaching sources and using information found online—the decision Bailey and Bass faced. The Times and Dow Jones did instruct their reporters to identify themselves when using social media for professional purposes. As for which social media personal information could be used in an article, Dow Jones said nothing, and the Times said only, “[w]hat people write on Facebook sites is publicly available information, like anything posted on any site that is not encrypted.”

The information Bailey had accessed behind Del Rocco’s wall wasn’t “encrypted,” so the Times would apparently consider Del Rocco’s Facebook postings public. But just because material was public did not necessarily mean it was ethical to publish it. As Siobhan Butterworth, reader’s editor of the Guardian , had written:

The fact that information is more or less publicly available may not be a complete answer to all arguments about privacy. Privacy is about intrusion rather than secrecy and the question is whether you have a reasonable expectation that something is private, rather than whether you have done or said something in public. These concepts are not easy to apply to social networking sites where the point of the exercise is to share information with others. [3]

Virginia Tech shooting . There was precedent for using Facebook material. Immediately after a 2007 mass killing at Virginia Tech University , students went on Facebook to express grief, console each other, and share information. Facebook traffic quintupled overnight. Reporters, in turn, used Facebook to track students touched by the violence. An article in the Guardian said:

The tragedy may have been the moment when mainstream American news channels woke up to the immediacy and power of personal accounts on Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and Twitter. But it was also the moment many Web 2.0 users first encountered digital doorstepping. [4]

Many students objected to journalists’ entering their online communities, and a debate about “digital doorstepping” broke out among bloggers, old media journalists, press critics, and students. A Virginia Tech student told the Guardian : “You have reporters that will create a Facebook identity just to get students’ contact information, or who will start an online memorial to get people posting for a story. It’s just inappropriate.” [5] Adam Tinworth, blogger and media critic, said a clash of cultures led to the controversy:

Fundamentally, what we have here is the clash of two great bodies of ignorance. On the side of the journalists, it’s a complete failure to understand the culture and emotional weight of some of these online communities. They charge in, trying to apply physical world models to a new environment and wonder why they get a hostile reaction.

On the part of the online community users, it’s a case of failing to really comprehend the nature of privacy in these online environments. For a long time they’ve been able to rely on a general ignorance of their parents, bosses and the world at large of them… That time has gone. [6]

Tinworth said users of social media “need to understand that those spaces are only truly private when they use the privacy features.” But the Guardian ’s Butterworth argued that a “friends only” designation did not necessarily make information off-limits.

“Friend” is a term of art on social networking sites and it’s not unusual to have hundreds of them. Your Facebook friends may be real friends—people who might feed the cat when you’re away—but they may also be co-workers, your peers at college, business contacts and people you have to accept as friends because it would be impolitic to reject or block them. A Facebook friend may be a “frenemy”—defined by urbandictionary.com as “someone who is both friend and enemy, a relationship that is both mutually beneficial or dependent while being competitive, fraught with risk and mistrust.” It’s complicated. [7]

Vlad Voinov story . The Independent had had its own instructive experience using Facebook material for an article. In August 2008, a University of Connecticut undergraduate student, Vladimir Voinov, was shot in the chest and killed. As Bass looked into the story, a source emailed him a long post Voinov had written on his Facebook page about gang ties. In the piece, Voinov foresaw his death, predicting that one night an “unidentified assailant” would kill him. [8]

Caught up in this “juicy story” and only vaguely familiar with social networks, Bass at first did not consider the ethics of using this information. He did not, for example, try to find out if Voinov’s post had been intended for only his Facebook friends. “I didn’t stop to think," Bass says. He simply “threw it up” on the Internet in an article headlined, “Murder Victim Led Double Life.” The subject of the story was dead; it was impossible to get his consent or to do him harm. On the other hand, as Bass says, “there were still some sensitivities about the family.” For that reason, media outlets might hesitate to publish a photo of a murder victim.

As it turned out, Voinov’s post was available to anyone affiliated with the University of Connecticut . Bass says he got lucky: “I was accidentally ethical.” But the experience taught him about the ethical quicksand of social networks, making it clear to him that just because information was accessible online didn’t necessarily make it usable in a news article.