Privacy, public interest and social networking

Earlier this year, in conjunction with the LSE-based think tank Polis, we held a seminar to discuss the issue. This followed on from research we commissioned in 2008 and a number of key rulings that were made by the PCC during 2009, some of which have been discussed in an earlier newsletter.

During the seminar, PCC director Stephen Abell made clear that the principles set out in the Editors' Code of Practice must remain at the heart of journalists' approach to using material they obtain from social networking sites. This means it is not enough simply to say: "I found it on a website, therefore I can republish it to 5 million people". Instead, journalists will have to consider a number of issues - issues that will also be considered by the PCC at adjudication. For instance:

1. What is the quality of the information (how personal is it; what is the context)?
   
2. Who uploaded the material?
   
3. What settings have been used to protect privacy?
   
4. What is the public interest?

What this means in practice can be demonstrated by various rulings made by the PCC over the last 18 months. Most recently, the Commission emphasised the right of newspapers and magazines to use material from social networking sites when reporting on a death, as long as they approach matters sensitively:

"Newspapers still remained entitled, when reporting the death of an individual, to make use of publicly available material obtained from social networking sites. However, editors should always consider the impact on grieving families when taking such information (which may have been posted in a jocular or carefree fashion) from its original context and using it within a tragic story about that person's death". (Rundle v Sunday Times)

And last month, the Commission rejected a complaint from a teenager whose photograph had been published by Loaded, after initially appearing some years before on her own Bebo profile. However, this was more than simply a case of a magazine using an image it had obtained straight from a social networking site. It turned out that the image - and others of the complainant - had been circulated online to a quite remarkable degree. At the time of complaint, there were 1,760,000 matches that related to her and 203,000 image matches of her as the "Epic Boobs" girl (which was how the magazine had described her). Moreover, the complainant's name had been widely circulated and achieved over 100,000 Google hits, including over 8,000 photographs.

In its ruling, the Commission said this was an important point:

"...the magazine had not accessed material from a personal site and then been responsible for an especially salacious means of presenting it; instead it had published a piece discussing the fact that this material was already being widely used in this way by others."

Ultimately, while the Commission had sympathy with the complainant, it had to consider - as required by the Editors' Code - the extent to which the material was already in the public domain:

"The Commission did not think it was possible for it to censure the magazine for commenting on material already given a wide circulation, and which had already been contextualised in the same specific way, by many others. Although the Code imposes higher standards on the press than exist for material on unregulated sites, the Commission felt that the images were so widely established for it to be untenable for the Commission to rule that it was wrong for the magazine to use them." (A Woman v Loaded)

The PCC will shortly establish an internal working group to consider these issues further. It remains committed to taking a lead role in setting the boundaries between what is private and what is the in public interest.