Where Does Public Relations Draw the Line in Social Media?
An Address to the PRSA Bluegrass Chapter
Scott C. Williamson, Ph.D.
September 18, 2014
I.
Introduction
Being an ethics professor is like being a dentist. Go to a dentist with one issue, and they’ll likely
poke around and find a second issue. I am going to do something like that today. The first issue
is social media. I think that social media is an ethical issue, and my purpose is to discuss with
you whether it is an ethical issue for Public Relations.
To answer that question you will inevitably turn to professional values, and that is where I see a
second issue. I suspect that, like other professionals, you have some professional values that you
use, but don’t name in your Code of Ethics. If I’m right, you might need to address the second
issue about values, before you can do justice to the social media issue.
Let’s think about social media.
II.
The Moral Ambiguity of Social Media
When I say that social media is an ethical issue I mean that it contributes to the public good in
one way, and harms the public good in another way.
One the one hand, social media promotes the public good by creating new communities and new
opportunities for networking that would not exist without it. Just think of the ALS Ice-Bucket
Challenge. As of September 16, The ALS Association received $113.6 million in Ice Bucket
Challenge donations, and over 3 million videos have been uploaded to social media sites. The
challenge raised $88 million between July 29 and August 26. That amount compares to $2.6
million that was raised during the same period in 2013. The Ice Bucket Challenge is one example
of how social media contributes to the public good.
On the other hand, social media harms the public good by feeding the personal information we
share online to a powerful data mining industry that converts our information into data points
that can be sold to companies. As one blogger put it, “one minute I was filling out my profile to
join Facebook and the next minute some company I’ve never heard of has hundreds of data
points on me” (Jacob Morgan, “Privacy is Completely and Utterly Dead, and We Killed It”).
An article in Business Law Today, a publication of the American Bar Association, makes the
point well: “When we report online that we baked cookies last night or that we visited our Kia
dealership and test drove a Sorrento, that information, and everything else we share about
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ourselves is another database to be mined and measured, sorted and sold. Social media sites are
designed to draw as much information out of us as possible. A search engine site then takes
what we report and aggregates Kia owners and cookie bakers and sells that information to
companies who can exploit that information” (Theodore F. Claypoole, “Privacy and Social
Media”).
Companies are not alone in wanting to get a piece of the pie. In June of this year a Cornell
University professor co-authored a Facebook study “in which the social network quietly
manipulated the news feeds of 689, 000 users to study whether positive and negative emotional
states can be transferred to others, leading them to experience the same emotions without their
awareness (Goel, “As Data Overflows Online. . .”). Curiously the Cornell University
Institutional Review Board determined that the project did not fall under Cornell’s Human
Research Protection Program, because the experiment was conducted by Facebook, for internal
purposes (Verma, “Editorial Expression of Concern and Correction”).
Facebook said that the study was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users
agree prior to creating an account on Facebook—an agreement that constitutes informed consent.
Users didn’t know that they were part of a study, and they had no opportunity to opt out. Is that
really informed consent?
III.
Social Media and Privacy: An Ethical Challenge
Social Media destroys privacy. And the destruction of privacy is terrible for a society.
The upshot for Public Relations is in two questions: What does it mean to serve the public
interest? Can the obligation to serve the public interest override loyalty to clients?
Now here is the twist. As you turn to the PRSA Code of Ethics to help you sort out values and
obligations, I think that you will find a second issue. If I’m right, the values named in the Code
of Ethics are not the only values that guide you. Here’s why. Every institution, every company,
every profession has values that it names, and values that get the job done. These values overlap,
but they function differently.
IV.
Ideal and Real Values
The values that we name are not the only values that we claim. The values that we name in our
ethics codes tell us how to be a good professional. But sometimes these values don’t provide the
kind of practical guidance that we are looking for in a hyper-competitive marketplace, when we
have a 5:00pm deadline because our client’s brand is in free-fall.
Sociologists distinguish between ideal values and real values. Ideal values are transcendent.
They are true regardless of our context. They are the values that say who we are as an industry or
a company. They are the values that the public finds when they search our company’s webpage.
They are the values that we teach to the young professionals. They are sometimes called core
values because they come closest to the essence of our profession or company.
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Real values, on the other hand, are values that are fitted to our context. They drive our behavior.
Real values tell us how to get results. They tell us how to behave if we want recognition, or a
promotion, or maybe just to keep our job. They tell us how to use power to accomplish our goals.
They cannot be found on any webpage. And as far as I know they are not taught in any ethics
class.
Let me put a face on ideal and real values, by quoting two patriots on the value of loyalty to
nation. On September 22, 1776, a 21-year old school teacher from Connecticut was hanged by
the British on the charge of spying. We remember him for what he allegedly said before he was
hanged: “I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” We remember Nathan Hale
because of his courageous devotion to a cause greater than himself. Hale’s statement is a
timeless tribute to the soul of a patriot. Ideal values function like this.
Our second patriot was a general in World War II, who said: “I want you to remember that no
poor dumb bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor
dumb bastard die for his.” This quote might not express the essence of patriotism, but it’s pretty
good nuts-and-bolts advice for winning wars. For George Patton, in his context as an Army
General, the ideal standard of patriotism as a willingness to die in defense of nation was still true,
but it wasn’t what he needed to motivate his troops. Patton needed the value of patriotism to
accomplish something very different.
V.
The Code and the Contract
Public Relations has both ideal and real values. The ideal values are named in the PRSA Code of
Ethics. I refer to these values as The Code. They orient you to the integrity of the profession as a
whole. The Code sets the ethical bar very high by balancing commitments to the public interest
and to clients.
You also have some real values that do a lot of work but are not named in the Code. The real
values orient you to the obligations you accept in virtue of the contract that you sign with
employers and clients. I refer to these real values as The Contract.
Peter O’Malley makes a case for the Contract in his piece, “In Praise of Secrecy.” “PR ethics are
not rooted in the transcendent values of honesty, accuracy, integrity, and truth in public
communications.” Instead, PR ethics are rooted in the individual decision to sign a contract and
to cash a paycheck. If you can no longer advocate for a client then drop the client and move on.
O’Malley writes, “The public good served by public relations lies in our ability to promote the
lawfully-pursued, self-defined interests of those we serve.” For O’Malley, “secrecy” is a real
value.
If I cut-and-paste the language of the PRSA professional values, I can make a case for the public
interest as an overriding obligation:
Advocacy: we serve the public interest by providing a voice that aids informed public debate.
Honesty: We adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in communicating with the
public.
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Expertise: we build credibility and relationships among a wide variety of audiences.
Independence: we provide objective counsel.
Loyalty: we honor our obligation to serve the public interest.
Fairness: we deal fairly with the general public.
If you have an ethical challenge, such as social media and the public good, it matters whether
you turn for guidance to the Code or to the Contract. One will orient you to the integrity of the
profession as a whole, and the other will orient you to the legally-pursued, self-defined interest
of the people you serve.
“Honesty” and “secrecy” are both values of public relations, but they function differently. The
challenge is to name how they inform each other. Ideal and real values work together. Without
real values that drive our behavior, our ideals become wishes. Without ideals that raise the
ethical bar, real values become wolves. The question of the public interest lies in the balance.
Works Cited
ALS Ice Bucket Challenge data found at the ALS Association (www.alsa.org)
Jacob Morgan, “Privacy is Completely and Utterly Dead, and We Killed It,” Forbes.com, August 19, 2014
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2014/08/19/privacy-is-completely-and-utterly-dead-andwe-killed-it/
Theodore F. Claypoole, “Privacy and Social Media,” Business Law Today, January 2014
(http://www.americanbar.org/publications/blt/2014/01/03a_claypoole.html)
Vindu Goel, “As Data Overflows Online, Researchers Grapple with Ethics,” NYTimes.com, August 12,
2014 (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/technology/the-boon-of-online-data-puts-social-sciencein-a-quandary.html?_r=0)
Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory, and Jeffrey Hancock, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional
contagion through social networks,” PNAS, vol. 111, no. 24, June 17, 2014
(http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full)
Inder M. Verma, “Editorial Expression of Concern and Correction,” PNAS, vol. 111, no. 29, July 22, 2014,
as found in academia.edu 8021165
(http://www.academia.edu/8021165/Editorial_Expression_of_Concern_and_Correction)
Peter O’Malley, “In Praise of Secrecy: The ethical foundations of public relations,”
AboutPublicRelations.net (http://aboutpublicrelations.net/ucomalleya.htm)
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