Legal and Ethical Challenges in Social Media: A Case Study on Invasion of Privacy

Social media is being widely used by the people from all over the world not only for
entertainment, but also to share a large amount of important information and to express
different views. However, with the widened use of this platform, some of the activities over
social media are creating several ethical as well as legal issues (Obar & Wildman, 2015).
Various laws and regulations are also there in order to mitigate all kinds of legal and ethical
challenges in social media but still, there are some cases that depict how the use of social
media is creating issues with invasion of privacy as well as other bases of civil liability in
spite of the laws (Spiekermann, Acquisti, Böhme & Hui, 2015).
Defamation appears to be one of the common civil claims that are brought against the
users of social media but it is worth noted that many lawsuits also involve additional theories
of liability. Some cases not only involve defamation but also claim infliction of emotional
distress, intentional but unwanted interference, invasion of privacy, breach of contract and
many others (Mulligan, Koopman & Doty, 2016). A theory of liabilities that can be used
against the social media abusers who disobeys the social rules and emotionally injures others
is the tort of the act on invasion of privacy. The tort law of America has been struggling to
define the amount of private information anyone can exploit for entertainment and profit
(Warren & Brandeis, 2019). However, balancing the individuals’ right to privacy and the
speakers’ right to the freedom of expression has always been a challenging task and the
emergence of social media has made it more difficult (Stewart, 2017).
In this regard, a recent case that illustrates legal challenge in social media can be
discussed. In the year 2009, a Minnesota court decided a case that depicts one of the civil
lawsuits that alleges invasion of privacy that occurred via publication of private information
on a social media platform. In the case, a clinic worker disclosed some medical information
of a person in the social media that are humiliating and it was done without obtaining any
consent. The information was unlawfully gleaned from the medical file to the patient’s sister-