Don’t blame Facebook

 

I was channel surfing last week and came upon a programme on BBC Knowledge with the above title. The description of the show says, “Meet people from across the UK who have made some of the most extraordinary faux pas on Facebook and other social media in the last few years.”

All of the people featured have learnt the hard way to think twice before uploading pictures and personal information to social media, and be mindful of what they tweet.

There were two friends who got booted out of America and lost money shelled out for a holiday because of a tweet that one of them put out weeks before their trip. While he tweeted about plans to “destroy America”, intending to have a good time, drink and take in all the fun Hollywood had to offer, Homeland Security was not taking any chances and officers were waiting for the pair on their arrival at LAX. They were detained, interrogated, and finally, denied entry into America.

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The hacker who hacked into Selena Gomez’s Facebook account and put out some posts that turned Justin Bieber fans into a hate army against the actress admitted that when hackers attack, they are just thinking of the challenge of beating/breaching security protections, not much about how it affects the lives of the people whose accounts they hack into. Well, the authorities in the UK needed to send a message that such invasion of people’s lives is unacceptable and gave the young man a 12-month prison sentence.

A Scots Guard was barred from the Royal Wedding of William and Kate for posting a tweet that referred to Kate Middleton as a “posh b*&ch.” If you don’t remember anything about social media, at least try to remember that badmouthing your employers is a big no-no (that is if your job is important to you). Also refrain from posting inappropriate photographs that somehow put the reputation of your employer under strain.

There were also cases of people uploading videos of illegal behaviour to YouTube – there was one person who filmed his speed racing and posted it on YouTube for the entertainment of his friends. The police were not entertained and they showed up at his doorstep. One of his punishments was to stay off YouTube for two years.

There is another programme, Catfish the TV show, on MTV that shows the danger of carrying on an intimate relationship with people you don’t really know on social media. In Catfish, people who have been carrying on relationships with others on social media and have never met each other contact the programme to help them meet with social media love. Often they reach out to the show because the other party is being evasive, avoiding a meeting and is generally suspect in their behaviour.

Sometime last year, news circulated that the Facebook post of a young lady cost her parents an $80,000 settlement, which the father had been awarded in a discrimination suit against his former employers. The girl posted, “Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver. Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.” Nothing wrong with bragging when you feel that you or your loved one has received deserved justice. The problem was that as part of the settlement, Snay and his wife had agreed to keep it confidential. Discussing the settlement with their daughter was in violation of the confidentiality agreement, not to mention a disclosure made to 1,200 of their daughter’s Facebook friends.

Even heads of state have found themselves entangled in the web of social media and related matters. Not too long ago, the President of the United States of America (POTUS), Barack Obama, found himself, once again, the subject of a selfie scandal when David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox (Baseball Team) got a selfie photo with POTUS, which he tweeted to his followers. The problem is that the selfie became part of a Samsung marketing campaign, and the image of POTUS cannot be used for commercial gain. And who can forget the buzz over POTUS’ selfie with the UK’s David Cameron and Denmark’s Helle Thorning-Schmidt at the funeral of Nelson Mandela in 2013? It seems the David Ortiz selfie was the last of its kind though, as POTUS has ignored subsequent requests for selfies at public appearances.

Last year, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, came under fire on election-day when he tweeted a selfie of his inked finger against the party symbol, the Lotus, while at the polling station, and outside. Electoral laws in India do not allow politicians to make public rallies or use media to “display to the public any election campaign materials within 48 hours of an election and also within 100m of the polling station.”

And at home, it is undeniable that social media played a role in the level of participation in the 2015 elections. It has been a while since we had elections as exciting and engaging as the March/April 2015 elections.

There have been cases where homicides and suicides have been directly linked to social media activities, so we must all be very careful that our desire to have fun and share our lives with our friends and fans does not bring us harm. The bottom line is that we must pay more attention to what we decide to share with the world and when. Keep in mind that the rules that apply in the real world do not vanish in the virtual world of the Internet.