Facebook vs Daily Mail: In the online age, is rewriting a story sufficient?
At one level the legal threats by Facebook against the Daily Mail are fairly straight forward: newspaper runs horror story about a firm, firm says story is all wrong and threatens to sue for libel.
At another level, though this story highlights how much difference there is about correcting a story in the online sphere. The Daily Mail has changed the text of its story but as The Guardian reports, that’s not enough for Facebook who complained that a story supposedly about it was in fact about a different social network:
The giant social networking site, which has 23 million users in the UK alone, said that although the Mail has changed the headline of the article online – so that it now reads “I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you” – it had not at first changed the page title of the article online, used by internet search engines to index content, nor the URL of the piece, which is also a factor in search-engine indexing.
At 10am today the title still read “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you” while the URL contained the text “i-posed-girl-14-facebook-what-followed-sicken-you”. The title and URL were, however, amended before noon.
A UK spokeswoman for Facebook had said that if the title and URL were not changed it would proceed with legal action.
To me, the story also highlights how off the pace the Press Complaints Commission is. Too often the media habit is to correct an error with a small paragraph a few days later. Not only are there no commonly followed standards for online correction (e.g. should you make clear a piece has been corrected?) but the wider set of issues such as URLs and so on has been almost completely left untouched.
There is a clear leadership role for the PCC here in setting out standards that meet the expectations of the public (who rate journalists as the second least trustworthy profession in the UK – a state of affairs that should be a call to action).
Strange how FB will go to extreme lengths to prevent the term “Facebook” being used, yet quite happily exploit data protection laws in relation to it’s users, with no choice of complaint or legal action.
I remember the Daily Mail headline
“How using facebook can give you cancer”……………
The Mail have been at war with social networking for a reason. Social networking is killing traditional print media
Can you please correct this piece as was requested on 19th January 2010?
http://www.libdemvoice.org/a-challenge-to-the-press-complaints-commission-to-improve-its-code-17610.html
I didn’t change the piece because although your comment adds some useful, I don’t think it actually directly contradicts what was said in the post. Partly that depends on how you interpret the words “its” (does its mean the code produced by a body or the code used by a body?), and I guess from your comment that you might disagree with that.
But that’s why I didn’t change the text – but did leave your comment there so that people can make their own judgement (and also know the extra information which you kindly took the time to provide).
Thank you.
The glaring factual inaccuracy is that you stated that “the Press Complaints Commission is currently reviewing its Editors’ Code of Practice. It is not. The Editors’ Code of Practice Committee (a separate body http://www.editorscode.org.uk/) is reviewing the newspaper and periodical industry’s Code of Practice.
This premise led to the further inaccuracies of the headline of “A challenge to the Press Complaints Commission to improve its code” and a call to your readers to “add your voice to the call for the Press Complaints Commission to change the rules.”
As I said, in common parlance the code is the PCC’s, because it’s the code it acts on. You’re right that there is some extra information that is relevant, which is why I’m grateful you took the time to provide it on the original post.
Given the PCC’s role it also could (and in my view, should) be providing some clear and public leadership on how the code should change, particularly to deal with the impact of the internet and the extremely low esteem in which journalists are held by the public. Those are both matters on which – for example – the chair of the PCC could be giving speeches saying “the industry must changes its standards by doing XXXX”.
However I will admit to being rather surprised at the use of phrases such as “glaring factual inaccuracy” given, after all, the sorts of statements in newspapers that the PCC rules don’t count as factual errors that are in breach of the code 🙂