The White Knight Jousted Of His Horse

Celebgate And The Ethics Of Journalism In The Online Age

In August 2014, an unknown hacker or group of hackers illegally collected private photographs of over a hundred celebrities or public figures from Apple’s iCloud data storage service and distributed these on the Internet. Among these images were nude or suggestive photographs, taken for private use. Among the victims of the attack were actress Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton (Doom, 2015: 8). This event became known as ‘Celebgate’ or ‘The Fappening’. After the initial release onto webpages Reddit and 4Chan, news of the event spread quickly through mass media. The distribution of these images and the way the media responded to them raises some interesting questions about the way journalism has changed. Do journalists still have the same role in deciding what content circulates in the public domain? Should all information be available to everyone and free? How do journalists cope with the lack of accountability users have? What kinds of currency do journalists deal with? All of these questions will be explored in this blog, with a special attention for the ethical aspects of these problems, using the following concepts: ‘the end of anticipation’ by Naomi Baron, cultural currency, and ‘secondary gatekeeping’ by Jane Singer. We will show that the role of journalists as gatekeepers has changed because of the influence of users. User-generated visibility pressures journalists to abandon their ethical judgement, even though this is one of the main characteristics that journalists use to distinguish themselves from publishers. Lastly, we will argue that responsibility of audiences may have transformative effects on society.

Naomi Baron states that language technologies have transformed the way we interact socially with each other. According to her, through technology we don't have to wait until we are physically together to have contact, instead we share our stories virtually. She calls this ‘the end of anticipation’. This notion can also be applied differently in relation to Celebgate if we connect it to Folker Hanusch’s article on the representation of death in the online age. He states that, on the Internet, everyone expects news and information to be free (Hanusch, 2010: 146). On top of that, he quotes research that found that commitment to freedom of expression was one of the reasons people seek out representations of death online (Hanusch, 2010: 153). This relates to the meme of ‘Information wants to be free’, a sentence first uttered by Stewart Brand. The quote has been interpreted and used in many ways, because, as it befits a meme, it started to have its own life. It became related to the Hacker Ethic. As Stephen Levy states: ‘The phrase has been described as “a battle cry for the relentless march of the Internet”; “The single dominant ethic in this [digital] community”; and “the defining slogan of the information age.”’ For some it became a mantra, an ideology, or even a religion. So, arguably, the end of anticipation also applies to the desire and expectation that every piece of information should be available to anyone. No information should be out of reach. This might have very well been the ethic with which the hackers who released the images of Celebgate justified their actions.

This creates ethical dilemmas for journalists. Their role has changed because of the fact that now anyone with an Internet connection is able to publish news (Hanusch, 2010: 145). As Jane Singer states, in response to this journalists seek to differentiate between publishing and journalism. Journalism, stated as an occupation in opposition to publishing (which anyone can do), relies on news judgement, norms, and practices of verification (Singer, 2013: 57). This means that exactly their ethic is one of the things that distinguishes journalists. Because of the ‘lack of accountability’ of users, which lies in the ability to provide content anonymously, user-generated content can be inaccurate, irrelevant, offensive, and/or badly written (Singer, 2013: 59). The problem that emerges from this is that journalists are pressured to abandon their ethic. Celebgate illustrates this problem. Apart from the content that was published, the reactions also highlight this lack of accountability. As Eric Johnson argues, ‘Ultimately, this was a virtual sex crime in which men sought to outdo one another and gain popularity for themselves through the objectification of women’s bodies.’ The upvote feature on the websites Reddit and 4chan, to which the images were first released, showed that the more dehumanizing and demeaning the commentary about women, the more popular it would be (Johnson, 2014). This can be related to the idea that links and recommendations have become a new form of cultural currency (Singer, 2013: 57). Johnson specifies this currency for the commenters on Reddit and 4Chan as ‘lulz’ (the phonetic plural form of LOL, or laugh out loud). This belongs to a culture he defines as ‘a digital remixing of schadenfreude in which the misfortune of others is publicly exploited for maximum amusement and personal prestige.’

Of course, ‘lulz’ are not the currency journalists aim for, but the currency of links and recommendations is something they are dependent on. This ties in with the notion of ‘gatekeeping’. Gatekeeping is a ‘regime of control’ that determines what content is allowed to enter public circulation (Singer, 2013: 56). Journalists are part of this regime of control and choices are determined by an interpretive community (Singer, 2013: 56). However, links and recommendations have become a cultural currency, because users have become ‘secondary gatekeepers’ (Singer, 2013: 56). This means that in an open media environment the gatekeeping process involves more participants and ‘journalists perceptions of the newsworthiness of an event interact with the reader’s perceptions of its personal relevance’ (Singer, 2013: 57). This creates an user-generated visibility that journalists must abide by and are dependent on. In the case of Celebgate, this created pressure on journalists to cover the event. As Hanusch argues, images are often chosen on the basis of what the competition may have (Hanusch, 2010: 159). So, even though journalists may have had ethical reservations about publishing articles on the leaked Celebgate images, their competitors and users exhibited that there was a demand for them, which led others to publishing it as well. A sort of ethical middle-ground is not publishing the images, but providing a link to them, so readers can decide for themselves if they want to view them, as often happens when it concerns graphic images of death and violence (Trend, 2007: 149). According to David Trend, in this way the responsibility for selection is placed back on audiences (Trend, 2007: 160). In this way former gatekeepers have become gatewatchers (Hanusch, 2010: 56) and now instead of actively avoiding graphic images, readers need to actively seek them out (Trend, 2007: 149).

This notion of responsibility of audiences brings us to another side of Celebgate. As Trend argues, interpretations differ among audiences and critical viewing reveals when violence is unneeded, wrong, or out of place (Trend, 2007: 123). Despite of the significant amount of people who enjoyed the leak or depicted it as a scandal, there were also a lot of statements that denounced it, providing a different perspective that sided with the victims.  As Trend states, ‘messages that depict violence are powerful because they project a societal view, a perspective on how people can (or should) behave, act, or feel’ (Trend, 2007: 123). In this way, he states, media naturalize violence. Of course, nudity is not the same as violence, but they can both be categorized as graphic images and because of that the dynamics involved in the publication of such images are similar in some respects. This also relates to Habermas’ notion of the ‘public sphere’. Hanusch states that through new media, journalism can be democratized and ‘reclaimed from what are deemed all-powerful media corporations.’ (Hanusch, 147) So, if we apply this to the way media portrayed Celebgate, we see that if mainstream media judge it as a scandal, recommending women to not take nude pictures in order for them not to be stolen, this view may become naturalized. However, because of the dynamics of secondary gatekeeping and user-generated content, it became possible to voice another opinion on Celebgate and in this way influence and even transform the societal view on it.

In conclusion, we showed that relating the notion of ‘the end of anticipation’ to the slogan ‘Information wants to be free’ explains the desire and expectation that every piece of information should be available to anyone. This leads to a justification of events like Celebgate, which is made easier because of the lack of accountability users enjoy, in contrast to journalists. This puts journalists on a challenging crossroads. On the one hand, they distinguish journalism from publishing by their ethics (among other things), but on the other hand, they are under pressure because the information that they would withhold because of ethical reasons is available elsewhere anyway. This pressure originates from the notion of user-generated visibility that relates to a new cultural currency consisting of links and recommendations. The original role of gatekeepers journalists now have to share with users, who function as secondary gatekeepers through this process of sharing and recommending. This places the responsibility of selection back on audiences, which sometimes allows voices deviant from mainstream media to become heard and impact society. Journalists have to find a way to adjust to their new role and to cope with the challenges they face.

Discussion: Journalists can no longer hold on to a ‘white knight’ ethic, because user-generated visibility pressures them to follow the decrees of secondary gatewatchers.

B.L., E.K., L.C., N.R., R.H.

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Bibliography

Doom, J. (2015) ‘The New Porn Platform: Standards Gaps in ‘Revenge Porn’ Policy and Protection’, in: gnovis Journal. Volume XV(2): 1-13.  

Hanusch, F. (2010) ‘Representing Death in the Online Age’, in: Representing Death in the News: Journalism, Media and Mortality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 145-160.

Levy, S. (2014) ‘Hackers at 30’, Backchannel. https://medium.com/backchannel/the-definitive-story-of-information-wants-to-be-free-a8d95427641c (6 November 2015).

Singer, J. (2013) ‘User-generated visibility: Secondary gatekeeping in a shared media space’, in: New Media and Society. Vol. 16(1): 55–73.

Trend, D. (2007) ‘But We Can Understand It: Beyond Polemics in the Media Violence Debate’, in: The Myth of Media Violence: A Critical Introduction. Malden, Oxford & Carlton: Blackwell Publishing: 108-123.