Regulating Social Media: Legal and Ethical Considerations

Convergence, participatory culture, multimedia technologies, and social media platforms are creating new communicative opportunities that fundamentally influence citizenship and journalism. Social media present a staggering breadth of legal and ethical matters to consider. The limits and laws of free expression in this new media landscape are beginning to emerge both domestically and internationally, causing us to ask the following questions: How do we conceive of privacy? Should the law protect citizen journalists? How do social media affect ethical obligations of journalists and public relations professionals?
These are just a few of the issues raised by the new social media landscape. Myriad standards of professional ethics command compliance in order for various media industries to function. Scholarly researchers of social media have not yet focused on the rights of expression and ethical obligations of the new media environment.
This volume will address the scope and nature of this developing environment of expression with chapter topics ranging from privacy, cyber-bullying, and harassment to defamation, intellectual property rights, and online safety.