Accounting (Ethics Paper)

Ethics (Spring 2016)

The topic is: What role does ethics play in the world of social media? In many cases, postings on social media seem to “cross the line” when it comes to ethics. Social media organizations have difficulty drawing “the line” when it comes to ethical behavior in social media. Safeguards, which sites like Facebook or Twitter put in place, provide some oversight. However, varying ethical standards among social media participants make the process difficult.

Questions:

1) Does a social media company have a responsibility to society to enforce ethical standards related to its product? Explain.

2) Should business users of social media have a different set of ethical standards for social media than casual users? Explain.

3) Some organizations have crafted social media codes of ethics related to their employee actions. For example, see: http://ethics.npr.org/tag/social-media/ . Review this code of ethics. Its tenets include: Accuracy, Honesty, Independence, Impartiality, Accountability, Respect, and Excellence. Locate a social media posting by one of the 2016 presidential candidates. Using the tenets above, analyze on a tenet by tenet basis, the posting using the code of ethics linked above. Please pick a post to analyze that is interesting, controversial, or thought provoking and not boring as dirt.

Your paper should focus on the topic in the first paragraph above and should answer questions 1-3 above. The paper must be printed and handed in no later than April 27. Response should be in a 1-2 page typed paper which properly cites at least one online article in answering items 1 & 2 above. This article cannot be the linked item above.

Attachments to your paper:

1) Print and staple the online article you reference to in this paper.

2) Print and staple the social media post you analyze to this paper.