Ethic in Social Media Journalism: A Review on Social Media Accounts

The development of internet technologies has brought many innovations in the field of communication. Among these innovations, the most striking factors are that individuals are producers of content (news, information) and actively use social media networks in the communication process. The preference of social media tools has increased due to the features such as speed, interactive feature, free content, and being uncontrolled by the new media environment and these environments have also created new communication networks. However, communication practices carried out over social media networks have continued the existing ethical problems in the field of journalism and even caused an increase in ethical problems due to the possibilities of digitalization. The aim of this research is to examine ethical problems in social media journalism. In the example of Instagram, in order to identify ethical problems in social media journalism, the formal and content features of the selected Instagram accounts were examined. The determined accounts were handled within the framework of the evaluation criteria created based on ethical problems. Therefore, in comparison to traditional media and ethical issues in the literature, content analysis method was used in the study dealing with the issue of communication via social media and ethics. As a result of the research conducted in this context, it was determined that the accounts sharing the news / media company tag and the Instagram accounts did not pay enough attention to the ethical elements that should be followed in journalism, and even included ethical problems especially in the issues of source and reliability with digitalization