The rise of citizen journalism is increasingly pushing the legal boundaries of the rights and duties associated with the press in our connected world where everyone can play journalist for a day.
How can one distinguish between a newsroom and a living room?
Unfortunately I was not picked up in the recent lottery organised by Google and consequentially did not lay my hands on a developer version of the fabled Google Glass. I guess I will need to wait until 2014 to become a Google Explorer.
But just imagine how the Boston bombings would have looked like to the outside world if some of those present were actually donning the gadget. I will not enter into the privacy pitfalls of these devices as I will leave that for some other day – but it is certain that the reported experience that Google Glass provides would have further fuelled the thousands of people who took their shot at citizen journalism following the events that unfolded during the Boston marathon last month.
Minutes after the Boston bombings, people were rushing to several social networking sites, especially Reddit, Facebook and Twitter, initiating what can be very easily termed as a witch-hunt.
Every piece of footage, frame and photo was analysed by these pseudo-detectives who then discussed their theories and conclusions through the social networks.
Needless to say, they got it all wrong and went as far as naming potential suspects. It was a textbook re-adaptation of The Wrong Man – only that Alfred Hitchcock and Henry Fonda were nowhere to be seen. Crowd-sourced criminal investigations do not work.
Even though many users finally apologised for their sleuth behaviour, the damage was done, especially to individuals such as Sunil Tripathi, one of the men identified by the masses as a suspect.
Others were simply identified as Blue Duffel Bag Guy or the Blue Robe Man. A few moments after the real suspects were formally confirmed by the FBI, the moderators of the Find Boston Bombers group announced that they were going to delete all posts.
Surely, such an incident will happen again in the not so distant future and the web will once again be unstoppable.
While one can laud the interest shown by these citizen journalists who finally only wanted to see the perpetrators brought to justice, one needs to consider the devastating effects living in such a connected world might bring to innocent parties.
Citizen journalism is not a new concept even though the internet has catapulted it to a whole new league. The ability to ride on and amass user-generated content has enabled citizen journalism to flourish in the past few years. The Arab Spring is a perfect example of this.
People with no background or training in journalism can now easily make use of modern technology, together with the global reach of the internet, to write the news.
The internet is an incredible tool which is also susceptible to bad practice. Irrespective of the recognition that freedom of expression should apply online as well as offline, it is becoming increasingly difficult to draw a line between legitimate, rightful and blatantly stupid use of the tools we have at our disposal.
At this juncture, legislators will need to re-think whether, in an era where everyone can try to be a journalist for a day, present rules regarding the press do reflect properly this media revolution. Can freedom of the press apply to anyone who runs a blog or posts a tweet? How do privacy laws fit into this ever-changing equation? How can one distinguish between a newsroom and a living room? Can every citizen become a reporter? Should the rights available at law to the traditional press be now available to everyone with an internet connection and a basic understanding of Web 2.0 technology? I don’t think so.
And if you thought the Boston Bombing social media frenzy was the apex of this discussion, well, you are wrong. Only a few weeks ago hacker collective Anonymous announced that they were setting up a website for crowd-sourced news called Your Anon News. Many are those concerned however how neutral a news portal managed by Anonymous will be especially in light of their declared political agendas and anonymous nature.
How will such a site be accountable to its readers when you are confronted with a situation where you do not even know the author of the news item?
While I do believe that online freedom of expression is sacred, it will be hard to establish what constitutes an exercise of freedom of expression as opposed to an exercise of the right to be freely able to report news events within the present boundaries of press related legislation. Everything is becoming hazy and as always the law has quite a lot of catching up to do.
Dr Ghio is a partner at Fenech & Fenech Advocates specialising in ICT Law (www.fenechlaw.com). He also lectures ICT Law and Cybercrime at the University of Malta.