Last week, Facebook claimed two new victims. It violated the privacy of the most intimate moments of a man’s life: his dying moments. The second victim lost his job because of Facebook. Both incidents raise questions about the people’s use of Facebook and its relationship to the mainstream media.

A man was fighting for dear life perched high on a seven-storey building. He had slipped while working in an environment lacking adequate safety precautions. Someone videoed the poor man’s attempt to save himself as well as a fellow worker’s bid to save him.

The video was then posted on Facebook. The voyeuristic instinct that exists in all of us was perhaps satisfied. The number of hits and shares must have been enormous. The victim lost his life and his right to privacy while his family was made to suffer. Was there an over-riding public interest that could justify the posting of this video and its uptake by a number of mainstream media?

The video surely satisfied the interest of many members of the public but it was not in the public interest. Clicks, shares and voyeurism are not in the public interest.

Smart phones are radically changing the way we behave. All became instant videographers who can share their work literally with the rest of the world through Facebook, You Tube and other networks. While the producers of traditional media found satisfaction in the ratings registered through audience surveys, the smart phone producers find gratification in shares and likes.

Besides, the lines between the private and the public spheres of our lives have been blurred. Most share everything about their lives and find it difficult to believe why it could be wrong to share all about the lives of others. As Ben Alton writes in Blind Faith, privacy is beginning to be seen as a perversion.

Some media outlets carried the video. They justified their action by saying that the video strikingly manifests the lack of health and safety measures many workers are forced to work in. Had that been the case there could be a kernel of a justification. I have no reason to doubt the good intentions of those who so reason; but I beg to differ.

Many still think of Facebook as a private space. It is definitively nothing of the sort

Since there were other less harmful means of denouncing the exploitation of workers and the placing of human lives in danger, the pain caused to the family by the posting of the video is not justified. At most, one could have justified the use of just one still from the video. Or editors could have sent a photographer around building sites in Malta to produce ample evidence of unsafe practices.

Many still think of Facebook as a private space. It is definitively nothing of the sort. Even private groups are not entirely private as last week’s second victim of Facebook discovered through bitter experience.

It all started with the bravado of what could be described as a big boys’ prank. A bombardier saying through the use of colourful language how stupid the army is, wasting money on a gate that serves no purpose while telling soldiers that it does not have money to provide them with socks or undervests.

Some bright spark deemed it fit to video the whole spiel and place it on a private group on Facebook. Someone else decided it was funny enough to share publicly. It went viral and the bombardier was summarily kicked out of the army.

There is no doubt that many said in private what that person said. But what he said was on Facebook and anything on the media is grotesquely amplified beyond recognition. Now a Facebook group has been set up to try and undo the harm done by the other Facebook group.

Many were irked because while a simple bombardier was (rightly or wrongly) kicked out of his post, a government minister and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff hang on to their posts notwithstanding scandalous revelation after scandalous revelation. Small fry can be fried while big fish have to be protected in the republic which craves to give citizenship to robots and swears to send to prison limited liability companies guilty of corruption.

This brings me to the duty of the mainstream media to behave in a consistent manner with its own revelations. The media revealed that 17 Black belongs to Yurgen Fenech, the Tumas Group supremo who partly owns Electrogas. The Auditor General revealed that Nexia BT’s certification of Electrogas helped it win the tender. And the same Nexia BT had sent an e-mail stating that Fenech’s 17 Black was to monthly pump tens of thousands into the Panama company of the minister who was responsible for the power station and into the Panama company of the PM’s chief of staff.

The media should now distance itself from the Tumas Fenech Foundation for Education in Journalism which is run by money from the Tumas Group. The presence of the chair of the Institute of Maltese Journalists shames Maltese journalism.

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece