11. Legal and Ethical Issues in Social Media

This chapter takes the perspective of legal and ethical issues in social media to complete the multidisciplinary approach of this book. Instead of intending to give legal advice, this chapter encourages the reader to reflect on proper social media use. Previous chapters already looked at how legislation is related to social media. Particularly, the chapter on online ads (Chap. 4) talked about privacy and cookie laws. Furthermore, the chapter on e-recruitment (Chap. 9) discussed some legal practices for organizations not to recruit or to fire someone because of social media posts. The chapter on crowdfunding (Chap. 10) referred to legislation to protect micro-investors. Besides legislation, also ethical concerns have been formulated. For instance, the chapter on SEO mentioned the use of black hat SEO techniques (Chap. 6), and the chapters on business intelligence considered the impact of fake customer reviews (Chap. 7) and privacy concerns for big data analysis (Chap. 8). This chapter supplements the previous chapters by discussing social media ethics from the perspective of organizations, as well as the perspective of individual employees and influencers as social media users. The reader learns about the role of a social media policy, Terms of Service, copyright or intellectual property, a digital afterlife, and password security, among others.