Virtue Ethics in an age of social media
Virtue Ethics in an age of social media
PAUL GOODLIFF
Will 2022 be recognised as the year when a serious challenge to the ultra-liberal ideology behind social media began to gain traction? What had been developed in the late twentieth century as a utopian means of placing media power into the hands of ordinary people, had evolved rapidly into something altogether more perplexing. The idea of bypassing the traditional media outlets of television, radio and print (with all of the associated dangers of bias, unintentional, or otherwise) and selection by the few of what was deemed ‘newsworthy’, would now democratise news, and circumvent the perceived stranglehold on news by a mix of totalitarian states, where free speech was limited, and capitalist news organisations with a political and social bias. LinkedIn was founded in 2002 as a means of connecting people working in similar businesses, but the real game- changing innovation was Facebook, launched in 2004 (just 19 years ago.) Joined by Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok and a host a smaller platforms in the West (and in China, Sina Weibo, WeChat and others that exist behind the firewall that excludes western social media platforms), it is estimated that over
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