With billons of users, social media platforms (e.g. Facebook) are dominant players in a highly-concentrated online news market. They have great power over the distribution of information to their users, and over the organizations and individuals that produce it. Social media platforms use algorithms to perform functions traditionally belonging to news editors: deciding on the importance of news items and how they are disseminated. However, they do not acknowledge the role they play in informing the public as traditional news media always have and tend to ignore that they also act as publishers of news and the responsibilities associated with that role. This paper argues that it is essential for social media platforms to understand and embrace their role as both news publishers and distributors and highlights the essential responsibilities they must undertake so they can satisfy the infor...

With billons of users, social media platforms (e.g. Facebook) are dominant players in a highly-concentrated online news market. They have great power over the distribution of information to their users, and over the organizations and individuals that produce it. Social media platforms use algorithms to perform functions traditionally belonging to news editors: deciding on the importance of news items and how they are disseminated. However, they do not acknowledge the role they play in informing the public as traditional news media always have and tend to ignore that they also act as publishers of news and the responsibilities associated with that role. This paper argues that it is essential for social media platforms to understand and embrace their role as both news publishers and distributors and highlights the essential responsibilities they must undertake so they can satisfy the infor...

The right to be forgotten has been widely discussed from a legal perspective. Courts have analyzed the existence and constitutional compatibility of the right in the national legal order of several jurisdictions around the world. However, even if the right to be forgotten is not a universally recognized right, by understanding how the law approaches tensions that arise between the right to freedom of expression and the rights to seek, impart and receive information, on one hand, and a right to be forgotten, underpinned by the rights to honor, privacy and personal data protection on the other, journalists can extract ethical guidelines that can orient them in the correct use of archival information about individuals to report on current events. This work begins by explaining how legal debates can help inform ethical discussions about journalism. Then, by exploring the legal development an...