University Essay: Information Ethics and Posting on the Internet

This essay, prepared for the BCO3442 course, explores the ethical dimensions of internet posting. It begins by highlighting the internet's role as a global platform for information sharing and social interaction, while also acknowledging the rise of online toxicity. The essay presents arguments both for and against the freedom of posting, drawing on research to support each viewpoint. Arguments in favor emphasize freedom of speech, the ability to share opinions, and the potential for mobilizing social movements. Conversely, arguments against focus on the spread of toxicity, the prevalence of misinformation, the risk of political violence, the impact on religious sentiments, and the presence of explicit content. The essay concludes by acknowledging the complexity of the issue and emphasizing the need for awareness regarding the potential consequences of online posts.

Running Head: INFORMATION AND ETHICS MANAGEMENT
BCO3442 Information Ethics and Management
Name of the Student
Name of the University

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Introduction
Internet is a platform that millions of people around the world use for gathering
knowledge and performing some other important activities like online shopping, bill payments
and others. Social media are virtual public forums where the internet users share their ideas and
discuss various topics. However, recently, due to some deliberate nonsensical posts by some of
the users, toxicity spreads throughout the internet resulting in heated conversations or even
fights. Some more serious issues result in political wars, street fights, religious wars and others
that are also growing due to provocations made by some users in the social media.
The main objective of this particular analysis is to find arguments both for and against
posting anything on the internet and analyze their long term effects on the human society.
Arguments
There are arguments both for and against the freedom of posting in the internet. Various
researchers have provided various arguments on the topic based on the study of different cases
around the world. The arguments are analyzed and explained below.
Arguments for the Topic
Most of the works that have been analyzed have argued for the topic i.e. the freedom of
posting anything on the internet. According to Breuer, Landman and Farquhar (2015), posting
anything on the internet is a basic human right i.e. freedom of speech and hence, they should be
able to post anything on the internet (blogs, social media platforms, etc.). Their argument for
supporting this claim is that the public forums like blogs, social media and others are created in

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the internet so that the participants can post their opinions on their own views as well as share
various ideas. Moreover, in a group of participants in a discussion forum, one participant can
exchange views with the others and all the participants are able to think differently with the
different types of views expressed by all of them. Hence, it is a very constructive idea to post
anything in the internet to share views and opinions. Morone and Kersh (2016) said that posting
relevant news and opinions in the internet also helps to increase the knowledge of others who are
not able to access any newspapers or TV news channels. When they access the internet, they are
able to find various arguments on different topics and get the gist of the news he wanted to
know.
On the other hand, Cottle, Sambrook and Mosdell (2016) researched about the more
serious and useful implications of posting in the internet by an individual. According to them,
different posts by individuals can mobilize a protest movement that has been stagnant for a long
time owing to lack of sufficient communication between the protesters. Internet can serve as a
platform where all the protesters can communicate in a common forum and share ideas regarding
how the protest can be mobilized. Moreover, they can also promote their movement in the social
media where more and more followers can join them in their movement. This is evident from the
recent protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt where the protesters came together through
social media and built up a strong protest against the government. Following these examples,
people from other countries are also using social media as a medium for mobilization of protests,
the most recent example of which is the continuous protests against the presidential election in
United States of America.
Van Dijck (2013) also opined in favor of this particular topic. According to him, what an
individual posts on the internet is his / her own choice and nobody has the right to instruct him to

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do otherwise. If anyone does not agree with the opinion, he can just choose to share his views
with the poster or can just choose to ignore. As per the researchers, most of the countries are now
democratic countries and hence, each of the individuals living in the country has the freedom of
speech anywhere anytime.
Arguments against the Topic
While all the arguments have been found to support the particular topic, there are
numerous other works that strongly argue against the right to post anything on the internet. There
are several reasons that have been presented by researchers. Some of the major reasons are listed
and presented as follows.
Too Much Toxicity in a Public Forum – Most of the researchers have agreed on one
common point i.e. posting anything on the forum sometimes spreads too much toxicity. This is
mainly because there are many types of people in the forum. Some are educated people who
know how to counter a misconception using suitable logics and some are mostly uneducated or
young people who do not have any logics and will instantly use slangs and rant about anything
that do not agree with their own ideas (Gritzalis et al. 2014). As a result, a hot-headed argument
starts and the toxicity spreads over the entire forum with more and more people joining the
argument. For instance, in the world of football, there is a great bit of debate among the fans
about who is the best – Messi or Ronaldo. While the most of the logical people agree that both
are equally good in their respective positions, some others continue to debate on the topic and it
turns toxic in no time. From a comparison of statistics of two players, the debate turns into slangs
and personal attacks. Sometimes, these debates cause great psychological damage on some of the

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younger participants of the debate. Hence, the researchers have opined against posting anything
on the internet that may spread toxicity over the forum.
Zero Logic and Revenge Posts – Some researchers have brought to light the fact that
zero logic posts should never be allowed to be posted on any public forum in the internet. These
posts are the ones that misguide people severely on a continuous basis. Some of the common
topics regarding this particular issue are clickbait and demeanor of an individual or an
organization. Clickbait is generally referred to a misleading title to a story or advertisements that
interests the users to explore more on the same and then finding an entirely different content. For
instance, it is common among many Youtubers to post their videos with a misleading title. While
the views get interested by reading the title, then enter into the video and find it to be an entirely
different content than the title suggests (Graber and Dunaway 2017). Another topic for this issue
is demeanor of an individual or organization. Some individual or a group of individuals may post
some wrong statements against a particular individual on the internet in order to demean or insult
that particular individual. Most of the times, these are only pranks that are later revealed as well.
However, some of them are done solely on the purpose of revenge and cause serious
psychological damage on the target of the attack that may also lead to his / her suicide. This
technique is also utilized by different organizations to raise some voice against the rival
organizations so that their market competitiveness can increase. Both of these issues are
unwanted and should be stopped by any means.
Political Violence – While some researchers have supported the posts in the internet for
mobilizing a protest, these posts can sometimes lead to severe political violence in a region or
country. Sometimes, the posts are directly targeted towards a political person or a group and this
situation results in severe implications. Some posts are directly heated against a political entity

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while some others are made using memes or cartoons that indirectly mock a particular political
entity. In many countries, these activities lead to the arrest of the person who creates these posts.
The arrest in turn result in protest of common people that soon involve the opposing party and a
political war starts immediately (Xu 2014). However, in these wars, the political leaders go
through no harm, it is the common people who are affected. These political wars soon turn to
street fights, mass arrests and then curfew. Hence, researchers have advised people to make
sensible posts in public forum and not just random anything that can result in political
apocalypse.
Religious Sentiments – This is another serious issue that rises from the nonsensical posts
made by some people to deliberately hurt religious sentiments of the others. Religious
intolerance is a serious issue in the current world and even smallest of provocations can lead to
massive religious fights. Already in several parts of the world, many countries are fighting with
each other based on religious differences (Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan to name a few)
(Stavrou et al. 2014). Further provocation in the internet can anger even more people who will
then strongly favor inter-country wars. Moreover, due to these issues, the mutual relationships
between two neighboring countries also break down with time. Hence, researchers have
expressed their concern that nonsensical posts in internet can lead to serious religion-based
fights.
Inexplicit Contents and Lack of Censoring – The researchers () said that in the internet
public forums these days, there are also young people (age group of below 18) who regularly
participate in the public discussions. Social media platforms like Facebook have millions of users
who are under the age of 15. However, some posts of older people are explicit in nature and
contain no sufficient censoring (Mitrou et al. 2014). These posts include violence or murder

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scenes, adult slangs, pornographic contents, disturbing videos like death moments and others.
These contents are not suitable for the young people as they can get spoiled easily and that in
turn negatively affects their education and learning. Most of the users do not care about these
facts and continue to post inexplicit contents in the forums. A particular issue that should be
included in this particular discussion is the “Blue Whale Game”. Recently, following a series of
unnatural suicides of some very young people (age less than 15), it has been found that there is
an online game named Blue Whale Challenge that forces a child to go through 49 days of self
torture (both physical and psychological) and commit suicide on the 50th day. The creator of this
app is a psychopath who exploits the soft and immature souls of the young people to ultimately
kill them in the form of suicide (Ratto and Boler 2014). The main concern for which this is
mentioned here is that, even few months back, almost no one knew about this challenge.
However, after the discovery by the investigators and numerous posts throughout the internet,
the number of children falling prey to the Blue Whale Challenge has suddenly increased
significantly. Due to so many discussions regarding the details in public forum, more and more
young people find it and then fall prey to it.
These are some of the issues that have been raised by the researchers in order to argue
against allowing anyone to post anything in the internet. While it is a fundamental right of a man
to post anything, all these negative effects cannot be entirely ignored. Hence, no laws can be
made to make people post on sensible topics and ideas but awareness is needed so that people
understand the harmful effects of the posts and stop doing any post in the public forum that may
have serious implications in the future.

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Conclusion
From the analysis, it has been found that there are both positive and negative arguments
on the chosen topic i.e. making any posts in the internet. The positive arguments mainly talk
about basic human right and the opportunity to share ideas and views regarding a particular
topic. However, the negative arguments bring out the most serious issues that the world is facing
right now and are further aggravated by nonsensical and deliberate posts made by various users
on the public forums in the internet. This issue cannot be solved by making laws as it will further
fuel public dissatisfaction for taking away their basic rights. The only thing that can be done is
raise public awareness so that the people understand the harmful effects of posting anything in
public forums and henceforth, they refrain from it and limit their activity in public forum to
healthy discussions and sharing of ideas only.

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References
Breuer, A., Landman, T. and Farquhar, D., 2015. Social media and protest mobilization:
Evidence from the Tunisian revolution. Democratization, 22(4), pp.764-792.
Cottle, S., Sambrook, R. and Mosdell, N., 2016. Introduction. In Reporting Dangerously (pp. 1-
14). Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Graber, D.A. and Dunaway, J., 2017. Mass media and American politics. Cq Press.
Gritzalis, D., Kandias, M., Stavrou, V. and Mitrou, L., 2014. History of information: the case of
privacy and security in social media. In Proc. of the History of Information Conference (pp. 283-
310).
Mitrou, L., Kandias, M., Stavrou, V. and Gritzalis, D., 2014, April. Social media profiling: A
Panopticon or Omniopticon tool?. In Proc. of the 6th Conference of the Surveillance Studies
Network.
Morone, J.A. and Kersh, R., 2016. By the people: Debating American government. Oxford
University Press.
Ratto, M. and Boler, M. eds., 2014. DIY citizenship: Critical making and social media. MIT
Press.
Stavrou, V., Gritzalis, D., Kandias, M. and Stergiopoulos, G., 2014, March. Insider threat:
enhancing BPM through social media. In New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS),
2014 6th International Conference on (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

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Van Dijck, J., 2013. The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford
University Press.
Xu, B., 2014. Media censorship in China. Council on Foreign Relations, 25.