There are various moral and ethical issues that affect social media and such include, Privacy & Reputation, Truth & honesty, Security, Safety. To begin with, safety is among the ethical issues raised. This involves children, in that they access the internet in various ways, and parents find it hard to control. Most children access pornographic sites which may expose young children in to ill manners at a tender age. Social media such as face book also contributes to children being loners in that, they only concentrate on their phones and laptops chatting. This contributes to cutting family ties.
Security is also an influential factor in issues that affect the social media. This inherently involves identity theft; when an individual pretends to be another person. In most cases, the pretender normally has evil intentions that have been aimed at spoiling the other parties’ name. At times, it may go to the extreme and destroy business relationships or even friendly ties. This mostly involves updating suggestive updates in face book or twitter. Posting wrong information in a business website such as hacking the commodity prices which discourages customers from investing in that business.
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Privacy and reputation a person is not guaranteed a hundred percent privacy in the social media. There are many cases of system hacking where ones private information can be accessed without his or her permission. One’s reputation is at risk if they have not involved themselves in various conversations in the social media, for example, Face book does not guarantee secure and safe environment.
Users have no influence in policy making process that affects their usage and interaction in the internet. The programmers who work on making the data base are mostly dormant user of the social media. Daily user’s opinions should be sampled for programmers to have an idea of properties to include in the social media. In the event of involving the users, it shows some form of morality in that the society will participate in making a beneficial tool to the community.
Truth and honesty and this involve firms who pretend by misrepresenting themselves on the line. The firms mostly pretend to be the user and influencing the system to gain some rank. By pretending to be the user, they get an opportunity to view people’s comments and suggestions about their products. This act attracts more friends and social groups with the intention of promoting business. The act later disappoints the user, when they realize that they have been lying to.
All social media service providers are obligatory by law to reveal clients’ information should a court of law request such information. This normally happens in the event of investigating a criminal activity. The law is above the social media and any information can be obtained at any time. Never the less in some social media like twitter client’s information is collected automatically without their approval.
All social media rely on user trust of which it is supposed to be the other way round. They rely on the user to achieve policy compliance. There are barely any government policy intervention with observe to social media particularly in the developing world. Research acknowledges that the Internet is not 100% secure and so no guarantees can be provided that unlawful access, replication, modification of users’ information will not occur.