Managing Ethics and Social Responsibility of Facebook - Case Study Example

?Managing Ethics and Social Responsibility: Facebook Introduction With the emergence of globalisation, a number of multinational corporations evolvedand international trade significantly increased. Naturally, the increase in the number of business organisations intensified domestic as well as global market competition. A number of organisations were eliminated from the market over the last two decades and many others are at the stage of elimination as a result of the stiff market competition. In order to address this business challenge, today’s company managements particularly focus on concepts like ethics and social responsibility because they strongly believe that such policies are essential to maintain customer loyalty and thereby long term sustainability of an organisation. Some recently published organisational studies and other market research surveys also justify the promotion of ethics and social responsibility in business. In order for promoting ethics and social responsibility in the organisational environment, today most of the companies perform community based services and publish a corporate sustainability report periodically. These concepts are of greater importance in online business sector too. This paper will analyse the contemporary ethical and social responsibility challenges Facebook is facing and how the organisation is addresses those problems. Managing ethics and social responsibility Business ethics and social responsibility are two broad and interconnected terms which play a significant role in determining the level of reputation of an organisation. The concept of business ethics represents a set of principles and standards that make an organisation’s business conducts acceptable to its different groups of stakeholders. “Business ethics is defined as rules of business conduct by which the rightness/proprietary of the business operations/activities may be assessed or judged” (Prasad 2005, p.426). Commonly, business ethics is identified as a normative discipline. It seems that business ethicists are more concerned with practical problems, specific duties, and other applications that might influence business relationships rather than focusing on the foundations of ethics. The idea of business ethics can be viewed from various perspectives such as the perspective of the employee, the organisation, and the society. In a business context, stakeholder groups including customers, government, competitors, general public, and other interest groups determine the acceptability of behaviour. The collapse of Enron, one of the biggest ethical disasters in the 21st century, is a good example of how unethical business practices may affect an organisation (Trevino & Nelson 2010, p.3). Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, the former CEO’s of Enron, intentionally tried to deceive the firm’s stakeholders by hiding the actual state of financial affairs of the company. Evidently, it is necessary to promote and manage business ethics in an organisational environment. For this purpose, primarily the management should foster ethical behaviour among its employees. Setting business goals and periodical performance appraisal are effective strategies to manage business ethics successfully. Another important thing is that the organisation has to develop well defined codes of business ethics and decision rules. In the area of online business, managing business ethics is becoming a complex task because internet based illegal and unethical practices like password theft are increasing each day. Therefore, online marketers have to give specific focus to the promotion of business ethics. Social responsibility is an ethical ideology that obliges business organisations to make notable contributions to the overall welfare of the society rather than focusing only on profit maximisation efforts. “Social responsibility is a management philosophy that includes contributing resources to the community, preserving the natural environment, and developing or participating in non-profit programmes designed to promote the well-being of the general public” (Boone & Kurtz 2009, p. 24). This management concept is extremely helpful to abolish unethical and irresponsible business practices that are likely to harm the community, people, and the environment. The concept social responsibility has four dimensions including ‘economic, legal, ethical, and voluntary’ (business ethics and social responsibility, n.d.). Economic responsibilities indicate that the organisation must continue profitable, and thereby contribute to shareholder values whereas legal responsibilities require the company to comply with accepted laws and standards of the society in which it operates. Ethical responsibilities simply oblige the company to do what is right and fair and to avoid any type of harm to its stakeholders and the environment. Finally, voluntary responsibilities reflect the idea that the company has to be a good corporate citizen and do whatever is in best interests of the society. For many companies, there is a separate department to manage social responsibility operations. Issues facing Facebook The widespread popularity of social networking sites like Facebook has significantly changed the way people communicate and maintain their relationships. Although websites like Facebook assist people to keep their relationships alive and to find new friends all over the globe, those sites face a number of ethical and social challenges too. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and this social networking site had over 400 million active users as of 2010. Since Facebook users are from different countries and cultures, it is very difficult to manage aspects like business ethics and social responsibility. As scholars point out, Facebook gives rise to a series of ethical concerns because it has the “potential to facilitate deception, social grooming, and the creation of defamatory content” (Ethics and social networking sites, n.d.). Referring to a consequentialist perspective, Facebook must give prime importance to ‘achieving the greatest good for the greatest number’ while developing its features (ibid). Therefore, the site developers have a fundamental ethical responsibility to make certain that their designs do not make any harm to the users. However, evidences suggest that site developers often focus on a user oriented approach and strive to make their designs entertaining for the users (ibid). During registration, users automatically accept the Terms of use and Privacy policy of Facebook once they click the ‘Sign Up’ button on the Welcome page. There is no tick box option to ensure that the user has read and understood the conditions provided. Evidently, it is a matter of ethics because users do not get the opportunity to understand to what extent they need to abide by the Facebook’s terms and conditions. In addition, the Terms of use provided by Facebook restrict users to ‘create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission’ (Facebook). Although Facebook delivers such a message to prevent the creation of multiple accounts by the same user, its system does not validate the user’s age or other contact details while creating a new user account. As a result, an individual gets the opportunity to create fake Facebook IDs and tend to deceive others. Likewise, Facebook has become one of the largest databases of personal information currently. Therefore, the organisation has a big responsibility of securing the users’ personal data by preventing their exposure to public. Even though the notion of ‘content sharing’ is central to the Facebook operations, the company has an ethical obligation to ensure the privacy of its users. It seems that many external applications linked to Facebook access and store users’ personal data. Although such applications give warning messages to users, people are not much aware of the security issues. The Beacon advertising programme launched by Facebook raised many ethical challenges to the organisation as this application tracked the purchases of Facebook users from third party websites like Fandango.com and Overstock.com (Lynch 2007). Those purchase information were shown to friends of that user (purchaser) in the form of notifications. To illustrate, if a Facebook user booked a movie ticket on a third party website, his/her friends might get a notification of that particular purchase. Since there is no adequate opt-out function, users cannot check this application. In response to widespread criticism raised by thousands of Facebook users, the company finally introduced an opt-out function to prevent unauthorised publishing of users’ purchase information (ibid). Finally, Facebook’s confusing and repeatedly changing privacy setting cause huge troubles to users and this issue makes users less informed about information sharing on Facebook. The major social responsibility of websites like Facebook is to strengthen human relationships and human values. However, it is identified that Facebook sometimes becomes a platform for hatred and verbal (virtual?) wars between cultures. For instance, there are many pages on Facebook like ‘Anti-Islam’, ‘We hate Christian’ that grow religious hatred among people. Unfortunately, Facebook does not have adequate features to block those pages quickly. In addition, there is no effective mechanism to review the postings and comments of users. Surveys indicate that many people post offensive images and comments that would negatively affect national integrity and intensify violent thoughts instead. Another social issue of Facebook is that some people use its common platform to plan organised crimes and call on others to take part in anti-national riots. Evidently, such activities are most likely to affect the overall wellbeing of the society as well as national security. How Facebook addresses ethics and social responsibility? In order to promote ethical business operations, today Facebook vehemently tries to develop features that can assure the security of user information and enhance social responsibility. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has recently apologized for information security flows like Beacon advertisement programmes and he promised that Facebook team would be committed to do better on privacy protection (Frum 2012). The ‘code of business conduct and ethics’ published in the Facebook’s investor relations page specifically reflect the importance of user data protection. This code requires Facebook personnel to ‘treat user data with extreme sensitivity and caution’ (Facebook. Investor relations). In addition, Facebook management warns its personnel that their employment at Facebook would depend on how they use tools that allow them to view personal user information that would not be otherwise visible on the site (ibid). The company has introduced features like ‘friend request block’ to prevent users from sending excess friend requests to unknown people. The Facebook management believes that this feature is helpful to protect user privacy and hence to promote ethical business practices. However, it seems that Facebook’s management fails to emphasise business ethics. Rather than resolving issues like permissive default settings and lack of opt-in options and informed consent from users, Facebook’s management team tries to convince its users through public comments. Zuckerberg has recently made a noteworthy statement on the subject of privacy. He stated that “people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that is evolved over time” (cited in Noyes 2010). Through his words, Zuckerberg tries to convince its users that sharing of user data is an attractive feature offered by Facebook and it is the need of this modern era. His opinion that ‘online privacy is fading in importance’ paved way for some hot debates among privacy experts. According to Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of EPIC, the view put forward by Zuckerberg is “absolutely incorrect”. He adds that “Facebook is company that is trying to erode the social norm of privacy” (ibid). While closely observing the ideology of Facebook, it seems that they try to drive the changes in line with the company’s self financial interests rather than responding to changing social norms. In other words, the company focuses more on profit rather than business ethics. Although Facebook is not so effectively applying business ethics in its operations, the firm has stepped forward in the area of social responsibility management. Currently, Facebook works together with The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in an effort to recover missing children. For this, the website has created a link to the new Amber Alert page allowing people to request Amber Alert (NCMEC 2011). This page helps people to obtain updates and alerts about the missing children across the country. Through this page, Facebook users can provide law enforcement agencies with some potential suggestions to search for missing children in an effective way (ibid). Similarly, Facebook offers improved features to ‘report suicidal content’ or ‘bullying comments’. Such options save people having suicidal tendencies and provide users with a good social networking experience. Some market analysts opine that Facebook lacks social responsibility activities compared to the revenues it generates from the business. In addition, some others are of the view that Facebook is the prime reason of many social problems and it does not often promote human values. The Victoria’s Chief Commissioner Ken Lay strongly criticised the Facebook management for hosting pages that could justify the act of the man who allegedly raped and murdered Jill Meagher (Oakes 2012). The police told that the company had badly lacked the sense of social responsibility. He also stated that if the company generates huge revenues out of the community, it has an ethical responsibility to safeguard the wellbeing of the community. Lay described those hosted Facebook pages as ‘offensive garbage’ (ibid). Another group of people argue that Facebook waste the precious time of all groups of people including children. Although Facebook has set an age limit of 13 in order to be a valid user, even a 5year old kid can create a Facebook account by providing false information. Facebook does not have proper mechanisms to prevent such practices and hence it raises some serious challenges to national economy. Conclusion From the above discussion, it is clear that business ethics and social responsibility are of greater significance in the today’s business world, because people are increasingly getting concerned about ethical business practices. The social networking giant Facebook is currently facing a series of ethical issues because this website often becomes a root cause of spreading hatred and violence across the globe. Undoubtedly, the company has failed to manage areas like business ethics and social responsibility. References Boone, L. E & Kurtz, D. L. (2009) Contemporary Business 2010 Update. John Wiley & Sons. UK. ‘Business ethics and social responsibility’ (n.d.) 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