Facebook is a good platform that people use to share and learn of many things happening around the world. Even though many people have the opportunity to know many things through Facebook, it is not yet in a position to rescue people from crime. This is because Facebook is not a force which has the mandate of dealing with crime (Acquisti & Gross, 2006). However, if Facebook gets notification of a crime that is being committed in a real-time, it can take action by notifying the relevant people who are the law enforcement authorities. For example, if a person is kidnapped for many hours or many days and that particular incident is being broadcast live on Facebook, and then Facebook could notify the law enforcement body which is later expected to take action and save the situation.
Information Technology companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft and YouTube together with the European Commission recently announced a code of conduct to deal with the spread of hate speech and illegal messages online in Europe. This can be made possible by coming up with laws which prosecute those individuals who break the set laws. IT companies have committed to monitor what is going on in social media and removing any offensive content before 24 hours of posting ends. After removing the offensive content from the sites, social media controllers should ensure that anyone who abuses social media in any way should not be allowed to report.
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Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube should take action against anyone who posts offensive materials on their sites. By doing this, many people will be extra careful with what they put on social media. This action should not be limited to those with the offensive materials, but also to those people who share lies which can destroy other people's reputation.
Names and every detail of those people should be made public. This makes it easy for other Facebook users to filter all information they get from the sites. This also comes out as a list of shame which may scare other people from abusing the social media. The first measure that Facebook and other social media platforms should put in place to help prevent acts of violence from being broadcasted is for these companies to review their reporting flows. They should ensure that people find it easy to report videos and any other thing that violates their standards and values quickly (Acquisti& Gross, 2006). This will allow them to get rid of so many unwanted materials before getting to so many people. This can only be effective if reaching the leadership is made easy, direct and faster.
Secondly, these social media platforms should get rid of live broadcasts and delay every broadcast so as to review everything before posting. The people who view these materials should ensure that they use technology which should help ensure that everything posted is not harmful to the viewers. This is possible if the person responsible for this task get enough time to filter these materials before streaming (Comer, McKelvey & Curran, 2012). This move may be interfering with right some people's rights of online expression but if executed properly will help tame social media.
Tough charges should be put in place for those people who misuse social media. Social media company owners should ensure that once an individual has been accused of any misconduct on social media, they should not be allowed back. Social media owners should take responsibility for every material posted for public viewing. There is no law which says that they should be held responsible if people post indecent staff on Facebook, and because of this, legislators should come up with laws that also vindicate these social media managers.
Facebook Company does not have the Ethics Officer or Oversight Committee. This was portrayed when Trillium Asset Management which is an activist investment fund wrote a letter to shareholders condemning Facebook leaders, Sheryl Sandberg who is the Chief Operating and Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO for lack of accountability. Social media companies are responsible for the spread of fake news and other unpleasant materials in social media, and therefore, should take responsibility for spreading misleading information (Patton et al., 2014). To manage this problem, Facebook should hire Chief ethicists to help executives handle difficult decisions.
These professionals could help come up with the ethical guidelines for the institution. They could also help companies in training other staff on good ethical decision making. Logarithms and computers might not make very clear decisions. The leaders of these social media companies like Facebook need human beings to be part of the decision making. It is believed that these companies are somehow responsible for the things posted on social media. Social media companies like Facebook have an ethical responsibility to their customers and to the whole public. Companies can significantly benefit from ethicists. A chief ethicist would help the executive in decision making when the crisis occurs in the firm or may even prevent the crisis from occurring (Patton et al., 2014). When such incidents occur, there is a place to start from or who to go to for an answer.
Facebook should ensure that apart from having the CEO, there should be individuals responsible for ethics in the institution. This might seem heavy for these individuals but will bring accountability to the organization. This means that when such bad incidents occur, there is a body which seats in a boardroom fighting to tackle the challenge as it comes. Having this committee also gives the public easy since people know where to report these incidents when they occur.
Facebook should also ensure that what the public gets is filtered so as prevent rumors which control Facebook. Currently one only needs a phone which has a camera to post any video on Facebook. Facebook IT engineers should ensure that before something gets to the public, they see it and approve. These IT engineers should find a way to ensure that before users use Facebook, they should ask for permission. This will help filter what is put out there for the public. Cyberbullying can also happen through Facebook and therefore there should be laws which protect people from these criminal acts.
The privacy issue was Facebook debuts News Feed. Facebook Company was two years when News Feed was introduced in 2006. Curated feeds aimed to be the central destination to prevent users from browsing through their friend's profile. By this time, Facebook had about eight million users and most of these people were not happy because their personal and private lives were being blasted for everyone to see. Approximately one million users joined Facebook News Feed protested that the feature was intruding into their personal life (Comer, McKelvey & Curran, 2012). Facebook responded through Zuckerberg saying that he was so proud of facebook and believed that things would be better and that they were willing to make bigger things for the community.
The response was not reasonable because the users were concerned about the private materials which Facebook was displaying for everyone to see. Facebook in its response did not say how it was going to solve this problem; it rather told the users to relax and went to brag on how Facebook was doing a good job in improving the lives of the people.
References
Acquisti, A., & Gross, R. (2006, June). Imagined communities: Awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the Facebook. In International workshop on privacy enhancing technologies (pp. 36-58). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Comer, R., McKelvey, N., & Curran, K. (2012). Privacy and Facebook. International Journal of Engineering and Technology , 2 (9), 1626-1630.
Patton, D. U., Hong, J. S., Ranney, M., Patel, S., Kelley, C., Eschmann, R., & Washington, T. (2014). Social media as a vector for youth violence: A review of the literature. Computers in Human Behavior , 35 , 548-553.
