The Morals of Social Media = The Morals of Profit

A tragedy occurred with the untimely death of a young boy, I won't mention his name because I don't want keyword traffic and I don't want this site to profit from his name. However, what I do want to tell you about is how sickening and amoral the media is, especially the CBC.

Firstly, the CBC jumped on this story this morning and you could almost smell their hysteria. It was like watching hyenas tear up the carcass of an animal. They were so excited to be reporting this tragedy, they couldn't even get their facts straight. They called it "The Death of a Young Hockey Player", using an irrational title to drag you into the story. The second unsubstantiated claim was that he MAY have died of H1N1 and of course they had no rational bias for determining his cause of death, other than the fact he was ill the day before he died. Pure inflammatory hysteria.

The next shocking aspect of this story was how CBC, in the absence of "proper" coverage, just flogged the facebook page of this boy all over the screen. But that's not the part that shocked me, that was just further evidence of how the media is using social networking sites as an excuse for laziness. What shocked me was the proliferation of ads all over the page that the CBC (or Facebook for that matter) didn't remove when they published the story (and the page on Facebook).

So I went to the Facebook page they showed on the television and was dismayed to see ads all over his RIP pages for everything from e-Harmony to Best Buy to the "Rate as Hottie" application.

Some social media analysts have likened social media to a "return to the campfire". Well, I don't recall anywhere in my studies of anthropology of having Best Buy jump into the circle around the campfire to try and sell "Windows 0.1". Or flogging some dating service.

This is a tragic, but emblematic example of the asocial and amoral behaviour of companies that claim they are human social networking companies. They are trying to monetize your emotions and your conversations, not your content or entertainment. Advertising does not belong in conversation. Peer recommended products are not the same as inserting an advertisement into the middle of a conversation. As many have pointed out before, modern advertising is an interruption. But worst of all, it's capitalizing on the social fabric of society, something that has never been attempted before.

Facebook is supposedly full of some of the smartest people on the planet, yet they can't figure out a way to allow people to flag ads as inappropriate in the context they appear. They have also made the critical mistake of putting a "like" button below an ad, but not a "don't like" button below the ad. This is really an epic failure on Facebook's part that shows us who they really care about.

For more opining on this subject, check out this related blog: The Meaning of "Life" Online - The Profit Model Behind Social Media