There’s ways to go about implementing a code of ethics for bloggers, and there’s ways not to do it. The Federal Trade Commission in the US is trying a punitive approach aimed at curbing instances of blogger payola (or what in the Australian context might best be called ‘cash for comment‘), with fines for misleading blog posts. The problem I see with this is that it’s simply going to be unenforcible; the blogosphere isn’t as clearly structured as the mainstream media industry, where regulations to prevent misleading conduct may work - and (think ‘cash for comment’ again) even here, regulation tends to be taken about as seriously as Wilson Tuckey, so there’s little chance that blogger regulation is going to be effective in any measurable way.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve just published an article on this topic at ABC Unleashed (and reproduced over the fold). Comments - and suggestions for more workable approaches to introducing a bloggers’ code of ethics, if you have any - are very welcome, as always.

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USA, blogging, ethics, media, regulation blogs, cash for comment, ethics, FTC, regulation, USA

Readers of Gatewatching may be interested in this: the call for papers for EDEM 2010, the fourth international conference on e-democracy, to be held in Austria next May, has now been released. I attended EDEM 2009 in Vienna a couple of months ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it; much of the work presented there (including the paper which Jason and I co-authored, of course) was directly relevant also to the Australian context, especially in light of the explorations currently being undertaken by the Government 2.0 Task Force.

From the CFP for EDEM 2010:

EDem10

4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010

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government, policy, politics, public sphere CFP, conference, democracy, e-democracy, government, participation, research, social media