The Media and Social Networking Sites
News Photographer, October 2007.
By any account, it was a horrific crime. According to police 16-year-old Demi Cuccia came out of her suburban Pittsburgh home on the evening of August 15, 2007, bleeding and screaming, “He stabbed me” and “I hate you” at her boyfriend, 19-year-old John Mullarkey Jr. Cuccia died 45 minutes later; Mullarkey, who slashed his own throat, lived to face homicide charges.
Just a few hours later, a memorial called “R.I.P. Demi Cuccia” had been created on Facebook, the popular social networking site. There were pictures of Demi in her cheerleading uniform and with friends. There were ready-made quotes from distraught classmates. And for the Pittsburgh media, there was a choice. Should they use these pictures?
That question didn’t even exist five years ago. But today, the popularity of social networking sites has created a new glut of ethical and legal concerns for the visual media. Facebook alone hosts some 2.7 billion photos from 40 million active users. If anyone can view them, can the media use them? Should they?
Legally Speaking
Legally, this is pretty much what we had to know as photographers until recently. There is a public space, in which we can photograph whatever we like and in which people have no expectation of privacy. There is a private space in which we need permission to photograph, or else we’re trespassing.
But what do we do about these pictures on the Internet that anyone can view? Are they public, like the “missing” posters hung on public streets after September 11 that many photographers incorporated into their own images? Or are they private, like a photo album in someone’s living room?
Grey areas are great for white balance, but when the law is concerned, they make photo editors nervous.
“That is an unsettled area,” said Louisiana State University associate law professor Christine Corcos, who publishes a media law blog. The Internet has no geographical location, and that makes the legal questions murkier, she said. “What constitutes private space and public space is very blurred.”
Then who owns the copyright of an image on a social networking site?
“You own the copyright for anything you create,” said Benedict O’Mahoney, a copyright lawyer who runs the copyright website www.benedict.com. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do claim a partial license over the material for their own purposes, but they do not have the authority to grant the media use of the photos.
Yet media do publish pictures from social networking sites, occasionally without permission, and there have been no cases specifically challenging the media on this point. Perhaps that’s because most photo editors will only use images from the site with the permission of the person in it, or, in cases where somebody has died, after verifying the identity of the person.
O’Mahoney said that even without permission, “you will always be able to copy a photograph if you have a fair use argument.”
Still, using images from the Internet is “fraught with perils,” said Jim Kubus, deputy managing editor of design at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “You run into ownership issues.” For that reason, the Tribune Review did not use photos from Demi Cuccia’s Facebook memorial, instead getting their photos from her family and from fellow cheerleaders.
Larry Roberts, the assistant managing editor for photography at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, expressed a similar caution over the copyright of photos from social networking sites. He said the Post-Gazette did not use images from Facebook with Cuccia’s story either.
However, local CBS affiliate KDKA did use pictures from Facebook, said assignment editor Melissa Rubin. They used the photos after confirming the identity of Cuccia, she said.
For it’s part, Facebook spokesperson Matt Hicks said this in an email statement: Facebook “does not condone the repurposing of any user information…without express permission from the user. We strongly urge the media to obtain permission before they use any photos or personally identifiable information from Facebook.”
“We originally issued statements to that effect in light of the Virginia Tech tragedy,” he said.
Ethical Questions
The word Roanoke Times photo editor Dan Beatty uses to describe the Virginia Tech shooting is “intense.” On that morning in April, 32 students were killed, and in the cacophony, Beatty said, “Facebook was a real revelation to us.” Of the pictures of the shooting victims that ran in the Times, almost half came from Facebook, he said. Beatty stressed they were used only after confirming their identities.
Beatty sees it this way.
“Right now is such an exciting time to be working in journalism because the way we gather information, the way we do our reporting, the storytelling options we have are all changing. It’s great to find an exciting resource like Facebook in a changing landscape. It helps us in putting our facts together.”
Four hours up the road in DC, Washington Post photo editor Keith Jenkins is a bit warier of Facebook than Beatty- the Post did not use Facebook images in it’s coverage, he said. But Jenkins is interested in the photo-networking site Flickr, which Jenkins has been a member of since 2004. He has even hired freelancers he came across on the site. After the July 2005, London subway bombings the Post used a picture from Flickr on their front page after getting permission from the amateur photographer.
“We’ve developed this Draconian separation between professionals and everyone else,” Jenkins said. “A lot of these networking sites are showing that the paths are not that separate.”
However, he added, “There’s danger for amateurs. They don’t really know the rules by which other people view this stuff.”
That gets to the heart of the ethical dilemmas that are sure to arise from the explosion of sites that share pictures. It’s one thing to grab a mugshot of a murdered 16-year-old rather than trouble her grieving family for one. But what about, say, grabbing pictures for a story about underage drinking from public Facebook profiles? You would have no problems finding pictures that illustrate the story. And what about an amateur photographer posting pictures of a breaking news event without understand their copyright rights, and the fact that they could be paid for their work?
Should we expect sophisticated media savvy from 17-year-olds keeping in touch with their high school friends and people who use their cell phones to photograph breaking news?
Justin Black is 18 and a freshman at the University of Virginia. He set up a Facebook account right before college to keep in touch with High School friends. He’s not naïve. “If I put something on Facebook, I expect that anyone can see it and anyone can cut and paste it,” he said. “But one bad thing about Facebook is other people can put up pictures of you.”
For example, Black said he’s “pretty sure” there are pictures of him at places where other underage people are drinking, even though he did not post them. “I don’t know if I can get in trouble. That would really suck,” he said.
I should mention that Justin is a friend of a friend I found using- you guessed it- Facebook.
Some young people are finding that information on their social networking sites can blow up in their face- and in the media. Consider Caroline Giuliani, Rudy’s daughter, who unwillingly was the subject of an August 6 article in Slate magazine about how the 17-year-old supported Democrat Barack Obama online. The article included a screenshot of her profile, which had a picture of her. Only the fake last name she was using blurred out.
“She didn’t lock her profile,” wrote the piece’s author Lucy Morrow Caldwell, “allowing any Facebook user with access to the Harvard or Trinity School networks (more than 42,000 people) to view her detailed profile.” But clearly, Caroline Giuliani misspelled her last name in the hope it would provide her some privacy. And Slate’s audience is far larger than 42,000 people.
There’s another ethical question here. Facebook “electronically ropes off” profiles into networks, says law professor Corcos. That means, for example, only people in the University of Virginia network can see Justin Black’s profile. (Caldwell could see Giuliani because she was a member of the Harvard network.) But what if a reporter creates a fake account so they can access the profiles of people in that network? I spoke to one education reporter who borrows an intern’s account to get in touch with people at a university he covers. Is that ethical?
And all of these ethical questions presuppose that the person who creates the Flickr or Facebook account is telling the truth about their identity and the circumstances of the photograph. That’s no sure bet.
Twenty years ago, who could have predicted billions of photographs only a few mouse-clicks away from a photo editor? There are certainly positive repercussions for this verdant visual database. But there are unresolved ethical and legal considerations, too.
Sadly, there will be more stories like Demi Cuccia’s. There will be more impolitic candidates’ children. There will be more underage drinking and Flickr photographs of breaking news. It will be up to this generation of photographers and photo editors to decide the rules that govern when, how, and why these pictures appear in the visual media.