The AFL ‘dickileaks’ scandal has been unfolding for nearly three days through mainstream news and of course, social media. Where it all began.
Ahh, social media. That sinister, loud-mouthed influencer of the digital playground where content goes to become viral, get blown out of proportion and break all the rules. Or does it?
The controversial story about St Kilda FC player, Nick Riewoldt and his team mate Nick Dal Santo has been flooding the Twitter stream since Monday night when the naughty photos were posted by an unnamed 17 year old teenage girl on her Facebook page. The pics have since been hidden (I feel that ‘removed’ is too strong to use when referring to anything on the Internet), but social media is still buzzing and amping the hype. Since the ‘dickileaks’ hashtag went viral yesterday, it has been mentioned over 1800 times by more than 970 contributors and been repeatedly mentioned in mainstream news reports. It is also still trending in Australia. 
Hours after the material was posted, her Facebook profile was closed down and the Police had been contacted. So with the photos, she took to Twitter where her follower count exploded from 200 to 8200. Talk of legal action has been thrown around but in Oz, Social Media and the law meet at a very blurry line. An article on theage.com.au has suggested that she could be charged under the Surveillance Devices Act or the so-called Upskirting Law (prohibits the visual capture and intentional distribution of photos of another person’s genitals) if it is proven that she did take the photos. It also carries a two year jail term.
So, should Social Media be bound by the same legalities that is abided by, by other media types through communications law? Why isn’t it already?
Copyright, Libel and Slander, Liability and Deceptive Acts and Practices have been identified online as areas where social media needs to watch it’s back. In the UK, privacy laws would apply to this situation and in the US, the ‘right to privacy’ could be brought into play. Should we follow suit?
This is the 3rd nudey Australian celebrity incident to circulate, escalate and Twitter-late this year.
This. Year.
In March, we saw Lara Bingle’s ‘deer-in-the-headlights’ naked shower photo appear on the Internet (but not before Woman’s Day reported it) and in early November, (then) Canberra Raiders player Joel Monaghan was snapped in a compromising position with a Labrador while celebrating Mad Monday festivities with his team mates. (See the censored pics below)…
A quick lesson in being a public figure in Australia: Keep your clothes on when around people. Especially if you play sport.
As expected, the good people at NMA TV have put together a very simple animated run down of the whole saga:
Cheers!
Coby
I think that the court system will be playing catch-up with the Internet for a very long time. The slow wheels of justice have never had to deal with a changing landscape like the online world before.
No doubt there will be thousands of precedent setting cases involving social media etc. over the next decade. But of course the Internet will always be ahead of the pack. The law will always have to play catch-up.
I think social media is no different to other media in being bound by existing law but there is a major practical problem these days: speed of dissemination. For example, suppression of a photograph – whether a photo has been stolen or publication breaches the owner’s copyright, was taken in breach of their privacy (for example, under EU law – the UK’s developing law of “privacy” has come about because of the Human Rights Act which was enacted because of the EU’s Human Rights Convention)or taken in breach of ‘upskirting’ or similar local laws then there is little chance of suppressing it these days as social media allows it to be shared tens of thousands of times in an hour. No change in Law can prevent that.
I think that there is a misconception that online or social media is not subject to the same laws of copyright or defamation. There does seem to be a developing ‘code of conduct’ when using other people’s images with most bloggers willing to credit and link back to the original and many copyright holders willing to go along with this even when it is done without permission.
We have found a number of blogs and other sites recently taking whole articles from our site and re-publishing them in whole. Some of these borrowed the images too and some even called the image from our server which seems a) naive and b) over the top. When contacted, many of these did not seem to have thought about whether it was ok just to copy and paste.
As for defamation; social media is a determined litigants playground – all you need to do is show that the words complained of were viewed in the UK and you can sue in the High Court there under a no-win, no-fee arrangement – bringing ruinous costs and damages against everyone who wrote, published (including Tweeting and re-Tweeting) or transmitted the allegation. Under UK law the journalist, newspaper, editor, distributor and shop seller are all jointly liable for transmitting the printed libel but I don’t think there’s yet been a case of someone suing a blogger, his ISP / host, Facebook and Twitter although there’s no reason at all why they wouldn’t all be liable. Anyone looking to do this or hoping not to receive a writ in the UK should look up the ‘Goldenballs’ case in 1976 when James Goldsmith issued over 60 libel writs against Private Eye and its editor, printers, distributors, shops who sold it and even the guy who sold it at a London station from his stall.
Thanks to Private Eye, here’s a good bit of current litigation around social media – Lily Allen called a journo a “lying c**t” on Twitter and the journo has now threatened to sue:
http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=street_of_shame&issue=1277
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