I’m working on a presentation titled “Social Media Ethics and Law.”  It’s also a course that I’m building to teach next year.

Social media is redefining the relationships between organizations and their audiences, and it introduces new ethical, privacy and legal issues. The audience for my presentation is schools, mostly higher education, but it is an area lacking for many organizations, employees and individual users. We need to have a better understanding of the ethics, and also the law, as it applies in these new contexts.

To use a clichéd disclaimer, I am not a lawyer. And my focus is more on ethics, but at some point ethics bumps up against law. Pre-existing media law about copyright and fair use was not written with social media in mind, so changes and interpretations are necessary.

Technological advances blur the lines of what is or is not allowed to be published and shared and issues of accuracy, privacy and trust. Many people feel that the Millennial and Generation Z individuals in particular have grown up with a copy/paste, download-it-for-free ethos that can easily lead to legal violations online.

If you have any thoughts on this topic, I’d like to hear from you. Comment here or use my Contact page.

My presentation will be at the NJEDge.Net Annual Conference in November 2016.