The CBC is directing its journalists to avoid adding sources or contacts as “Facebook friends,” and to not post their political leanings on their profile.
It’s part of a short policy document distributed to CBC journalists surrounding the use of popular social networking site Facebook.com.
“It may compromise your work by letting friends see other friends on your network,” the policy document says. “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.”
Also, the CBC says it won’t permit comments posted to bulletin boards or people’s “Facebook wall” to be considered quotes for attribution in matters of fact, though they can be used to establish “the mood or tone of discussion.”
All of this seems pretty common-sense to me, but navigating these social networking sites can be confusing for those who don’t spend every waking moment on the Internet.
If you’re a CBC employee, ask your regional or unit News and Current Affairs producer for a copy of the full policy.
What do you think? Do we have it right? Should we be more cautious? Less?
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It’d be better to have a coherent policy that didn’t rely on any specific site or application, and not let people use them for work purposes until they understand the policy. Facebook won’t be around forever, or rather, it may well be, but some other site will come along with a different nomenclature and other features and then they’ll have to come up with yet another reactive policy.
I can well understand why they’re a bit freaked out though. The site is a data miner’s dream. I set up an account a month or so back to read the details of a wedding invitation (I miss paper), and a bunch of my nerdier friends have found and added me, much like every other social network site I’ve come late to. The difference is that this one prompts you for how you met someone, shared affiliations, duration of friendship… the depth of information is an order of magnitude more than their competitors, and the privacy implications are already well-known.
I was going to list my political philosophy as “libertarian” but I suppose that would also violate the policy. Ironic isn’t it that a media organization would not allow its journalists to embrace the very principles of John Stuart Mill, one of the original proponents of free speech in a democratic society.
This document was posted — where else — on the CBC Network page on facebook about a month ago. I don’t know if anyone outside of the network can visit this link, but anyone who’s part of it can read it here: http://facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2246528261&topic=2782
Who’s the author of the document? Is this something from Burman (before he left the corp)?
This policy hasn’t been well circulated. I work directly in news and have never received a copy. If this is an edict from on high there should have been a mass email.
I think Kev is spot-on that a policy built around one service specifically is bound to be incoherent. Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace or whatever, it’s really smart to have a policy about how information from those services can be incorporated into the news cycle.
As for who can and can’t be your friends, contacts, or whatever nomenclature a social site uses, it falls apart very quickly. Sometimes friends and associates are sources; sometimes sources become friends and associates. Relationships can be multi-faceted, but I don’t think the software at Facebook or any other social networking site (besides flickr and twitter) for that matter deals with that reality very well… yet.
The policy is asking journalists to “to not post their political leanings” As if no one could guess!
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