Monica Guzman writes about journalism ethics for CJR.
Last month, Slate published a Year in Outrage calendar, which chronicled the stories that enraged the general public each day of last year.
Eric Meyer never meant to be Dec. 28.
The Ohio-based Web developer meant only to tell his audience of industry insiders how a Facebook algorithm that brought him grief on Christmas Eve illustrated a big problem with the way many online tools are designed.
But as any online writer should know, what we intend for our stories to say can have very little bearing on how people choose to read them.
There is a small but significant lesson for journalists in how Meyer chose to respond to his story’s reception. That lesson is tough to articulate, because journalists tend to look to only one place for models of ethical behavior–the work of other journalists–when everyone who shares information online faces the dilemmas that come when they understand that information has power.
This is a lesson about responsibility.
As the end of 2014 approached, Facebook released its Year in Review app, which auto-loaded users’ most popular photos from the last 12 months into collections users could edit and share to commemorate their year. While many Facebook users saw happy photos in the confetti-framed ads that invited them to post these collections, Meyer’s screen offered a picture of Rebecca, his 6-year-old daughter who’d died in June of aggressive brain cancer.
“I didn’t go looking for grief this afternoon but it found me anyway, and I have designers and programmers to thank for it,” Meyer shared in a Dec. 24 blog post he titled, “Inadvertent algorithmic cruelty.”
“Algorithms are essentially thoughtless. They model certain decision flows, but once you run them, no more thought occurs,” he wrote. “To call a person ‘thoughtless’ is usually considered a slight, or an outright insult; and yet, we unleash so many literally thoughtless processes on our users, on our lives, on ourselves.”
Soon after Meyer published his post, it took off, drawing more than 630,000 pageviews over the last eight days of December. By mid-January, it had been shared on Facebook more than 28,000 times. But like a game of Telephone, things changed along the way. A story about heartbreak and insensitive design merged with bigger, more volatile conversations about Facebook’s influence over users’ lives. Facebook developers had become the villains, rather than the stickier, broader problem of thoughtless algorithms.
In many stories, the details of how Meyer found grief on his Facebook feed had twisted beyond recognition. “To read them, you’d think Facebook had sent people to my house, strapped me to my chair, and forced me to read my Year in Review,” he said.
Of all the ethical principles that have grown more complicated in the digital age, “minimize harm” might be the most confounding. It asks that journalists anticipate the damage our stories might cause so we can take steps to prevent it. But there’s a problem. Stories are richest when they’re crafted for a limited audience. Yet the shortest path to misunderstanding is when a message meant for one audience ends up reaching many more–something that happens easily and often unpredictably online.
That raises a tough question: When the stories we create depart from our intended audience, are we responsible for what happens next?
Meyer’s story found me on my Facebook newsfeed on Dec. 27, well traveled. It initially received attention on Twitter, then jumped to Boing Boing and, significantly, The Washington Post. Post reporter Andrea Peterson contacted Jonathan Geller, the product manager for Facebook’s Year in Review app. “[The app] was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy,” Geller told the Post in an apology to Meyer.
By the time I found Meyer’s original post, he had published a follow-up that amazed me. His point about the importance of compassionate design had reached the audience he’d written it for and brought out other Facebook users who had received unwelcome reminders of their own tragedies. Both had responded with overwhelming support.
He could have taken that validation and used it to fuel his anger, or he could have assumed the role of innocent bystander in his own runaway story. Instead, Meyer did something unexpected. He apologized.
Meyer realized that he sparked a fire that had been directed not only at a company but at the people who worked for that company. Those people had been attacked, and he found it unfair.
“I am very sorry that I dropped the internet on his head for Christmas,” Meyer wrote in his follow-up post, referring to Geller. “He and his team didn’t deserve it.”
When I pressed him on this, Meyer assured me he wasn’t apologizing for sharing his story, or for any part of his argument about empathetic design, which he knows is correct. His was an apology of sympathy, he said, not guilt.
It’s tough to explain the difference. Meyer does not feel he’s responsible for harm he did not himself commit and he could not himself control. I agree: His original post was articulate and calm, led by disappointment, curiosity, and a desire to see something fixed, rather than the outrage that fueled much of the reaction.
But Meyer felt a responsibility to address the damage he felt his story caused. That feels right to me, too. In fact, it feels essential.
In journalism, it’s easy to measure our responsibility for the stories we tell with cold logic. Did we get a fact wrong? Miss an angle? If armies rise in response, there’s little reason to worry about their actions. Look at all those pageviews.
But I think our ethics could use more empathy. The kind of empathy Facebook developers could have used to recognize that not everyone had a wonderful 2014. An empathy that would have us treat subjects, sources, and readers not as heroes or villains in their shared stories, but human beings.
Even–maybe especially–when it’s not expected.
Monica Guzman is a CJR columnist, as well as a technology and culture columnist for The Daily Beast and GeekWire. She serves as vice-chair of the SPJ Ethics Committee and was a juror for the 2014 Pulitzer Prizes.