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Ethics of Sharing Information Online - Introduction
In fact, half of us pay more attention to who shared a story with us than where it originally came from.[1]
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Think Before You Share
The internet is all about sharing – sharing news, sharing videos, sharing our thoughts and opinions with our friends.
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Effective Debunking
Because social media makes us all broadcasters, we have a responsibility not just to avoid sharing misinformation but to take action when people in our network share it.
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Plagiarism
Closely associated with intellectual property – but slightly different – is plagiarism.
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Responding to Plagiarism
While youth actively participate in copying, with 95 percent of students in a 2017 survey admitting to participating in some sort of cheating,[i] they have trouble seeing their acts of plagiarism as having a victim. Ultimately, if nobody is hurt then we are unlikely to feel empathy and without that it’s hard to see something as being morally wrong.
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Privacy Ethics
One of the biggest ethical decisions young people have to make is how to handle other people’s personal information. Because nearly all of the services and platforms youth use online are networked, every time a friend or contact posts something they have to decide whether and how to share it. As well, youth may inadvertently share others’ personal information when posting their own content.
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Teaching Privacy Ethics
With younger children, the best approach is to have a clear and consistent set of rules, both at home and at school, about sharing other people’s content.
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Become Aware of Your Own Biases
One of the hardest things about being a responsible sharer is to be aware of your own biases, the reasons why you might be more likely to believe something without evidence. These are aspects of the way we think that can lead us to accept false statements, reject true ones, or simply not ask enough questions.