Topic 4: Reflective Summary
After reading Topic 4’s blog post it has become clear that there is no clear or simple solution to ethical breaches, involved with social media usage in both business and the educational sector. There is no single solution because not only have we learnt over the course of this module that social media can be difficult to monitor, but also because ethics themselves are a ‘grey area’. Whilst researching this topic I found that there were a myriad of possible responses, because ethics are not fixed, they can be influenced by personal opinions.
This week my blog focused on the ethics involved with endorsements. An article commenting on the lack of transparency amongst gamers inspired me, it described videos on YouTube where gamers were paid to review games favourably. From this I conducted further research and found that there are laws being put into place to increase consumer safety. Olivia and myself focused on similar areas, but she brought up a very valid point – it’s not just the endorsements themselves, but what product is actually being endorsed that may be the biggest ethical issue. A recent article brings to light the fact that vloggers on YouTube, with a young demographic, are using gambling and junk food ads to fund their sites.
This topic is very diverse – even ethics behind reviews on sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp have come under scrutiny. Tamara’s comment on my post brought to light the argument that consumer apathy plays a major role in the expansion of ethical violations. This was a very interesting point, as it suggests that consumers have the power to stop ethical breaches and that it is not only the responsibility of companies like the Advertising standards agency.
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