CBC tells journalists how to behave on Facebook

August 3, 2007 in CBC, Canada, Facebook, ethics, journalism, social media, social networking

The rise of social media poses new ethical dilemmas for journalists. One of these is whether journalists on Facebook should befriend their sources. Adding a source as a “friend” could lead to accusations of bias, but not doing so could risk offending your contact.

The CBC has stepped into this ethical morass by instructing its journalists to avoid adding sources or contacts as friends.

A policy document distributed to CBC journalists on the Facebook.com says:

It may compromise your work by letting friends see other friends on your network. It may also not be in your interest to identify yourself as a ‘friend’ of a source on their network. In the context of basic reporting, you do not want one source to ’see’ what another source says, nor do you want your private ‘conversation’ with a source becoming public. Adding sources as ‘friends’ makes the management of this much trickier.

CBC goes on to say that comments posted on Facebook cannot be used as quotes for attribution, as some news organisations did following the Virginia Tech shootings. But it offers some leeway, saying they can be used to reflect “the mood or tone of discussion.”

Social networking sites are new territory for journalists. These sites create a virtual “third places”. In real life, these third places are, according to the Pew Center, “the layer of civic conversations and spaces where people gather to talk and do things together”.

In the real world, these third places include churches and synagogues, community socials, barber shops, restaurants, child care centres. Online, social networking sites are emerging as virtual spaces for people to gather, socialise and communicate.

Facebook is certainly popular with media folk. There are 2,461 people on the CBC network on Facebook, while there are 14,726 on the BBC network. And the group, Journalists and Facebook, has just under 2,000 members.

The challenge for journalists is to find ways of navigatng these virtual places responsibly at a time when there is no established mode of behaviour.