Ethics & media literacy: Facebook in their yearbooks

Students at a Washington, D.C.-area high school found some of their Facebook photos published in their school’s yearbook, the Washington Post reports. There were pictures of everything from tailgate-party drinking to cellphone portraits to silly antics among friends. “Desperate and crunched for time, yearbook staffers resorted to filling pages with photographs downloaded from student Facebook pages. They did it largely without the permission of students and without crediting photographers.” The Post writer suggests the incident illustrates “how complacent the denizens of Internet vanity sites have become” about sharing their private lives. Maybe so. I think this just points to another piece of the cyberethics training that’s needed – the media-literacy piece. This piece of the training deals with issues like cut ‘n’ paste plagiarism and copyright theft. Here’s coverage from the Student Press Law Center.