Critics call for “more responsible use of social media”
There is currently a heated debate in the USA about the use of social media portals by police and law enforcement authorities. This was triggered by the Douglas County Sheriff's Department in Colorado, which posted the original video from a body camera on Facebook in January. Viewers were able to witness firsthand how a 29-year-old police officer was killed in a shootout during an operation. Critics are now calling for a “more responsible use of social media” and complain that posting directly online also circumvents the control function of traditional media.
Reach versus credibility
“The enormous reach of social media is of course a great temptation for law enforcement authorities. However, if the police use such communication channels, they must also be aware of their responsibility,”
“Phys.org” quotes legal expert David Alan Sklansky, a professor at Stanford Law School . This is not just about protecting the relatives of emergency services, but also a credibility problem.
“If an authority wants its Facebook channel to be trusted, it must first earn that trust by thinking very carefully about what it posts,”
emphasizes Sklansky.
“Social media offers a lot of space for speculation, provocation and twisted interpretations. Information should only be communicated on social networks when there is established facts and there is no longer any obstacle to publication. This is very important for the credibility and the associated trust of the population in the authority,”
explains Christina Stark, head of the social media department at the Vienna State Police Directorate , to pressetext. She makes a clear judgment on the case in the USA:
“We consider it disrespectful and disrespectful to the victim and her family to publish such material on social media. There are boundaries - even in the virtual, 'anonymous' world - that must be adhered to at all costs,”
so strong.
Fake emergency calls in San Antonio
A case in San Antonio has shown that the authorities should take the issue of credibility very seriously in their activities on Facebook etc. The local police department had started an advertising campaign on social media in which real emergency calls could allegedly be heard in a video. However, after research by the local daily newspaper “Express News”, it turned out that this was not true at all and that some of the calls had been subsequently changed or even completely falsified.
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Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )

