Real-time Ethics in the Face of Death

A female U.S. soldier witnesses the outcome of the Fort Hood massacre and transmits her impressions via Twitter, thereby unleashing a debate: when should eyewitnesses remain silent?

Twitter-user “Soldier Girl” was not there when military psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood, killing 13 soldiers and wounding many more. But she was at the installation’s hospital and witnessed the victims being brought in for treatment, and she sent her impressions of the event by iPhone out to the world via the Twitter micro-blogging service.

“They just brought in a container of transplant organs; not good, not good,” she wrote. Or, “Eight dead at the scene, three in the emergency room, two extremely critical and the rest critical; we just saw a girl who was shot in the face.”

She also took photos and uploaded them; she captioned one photo of a wounded soldier on a gurney, “This poor guy was shot in the balls.”

In her excitement, “Soldier Girl” reported there was a second shooter somewhere still on the premises – false information, as it turned out. After about an hour, nothing more was heard from her; presumably, Army officials who had imposed a news blackout finally discovered the Twitter leak.

Is “Soldier Girl” a journalistic heroine or a publicity-hungry woman looking for her fifteen minutes of fame? Or is she just an eyewitness, reporting her impressions using modern technology? One thing is certain: her actions have unleashed a discussion of ethics among those who use social media.

No awareness, no social evolution

Paul Carr, author of the technology blog “Techcrunch,” gave vent to his anger the day after the shootings. “It wasn’t a case of her (the eyewitness) trying to protect people,” he wrote. Her actions were a simple case of, “Look what I’m seeing right now.”

He pointed out that other bloggers and the media immediately latched on to her reports and that she further propagated them by asking others on Twitter to give her telephone number to media outlets so they could contact her for on-the-scene reports; her aim was to finally help end the flow speculation in the media. But the soldier who had become a citizen-journalist also had no direct view of events and sent inaccurate reports out to the world herself.

Carr therefore comes to the conclusion that citizen journalism has once again shown itself to be lacking: people have yet to develop a sense of what is true and what isn’t, what belongs on the Internet and what doesn’t, and when people need help rather than having their stories reported and their pictures taken. He comments that “the answer isn’t censorship (which won’t work), but rather in our social evolution catching up with the state of technology.”

Carr’s opinion is causing lively debate on various blogs and among Twitter users. British social media blogger Antony Mayfield asks “Are you criminally negligent if you photograph me lying in the street bleeding instead of putting a pressure bandage on my wounds?” Mayfield also points out that eyewitness material can be very important in prosecuting criminals: “What if you film me being beaten instead of coming to my assistance? That could be helpful to me as well.”

Human rights abuses uncovered

Other commentators like journalists Matthew Ingram and David Quigg emphatically disagree with Carr. Human rights abuses such as the police beating of African-American Rodney King in 1991 would have never come to light were it not for the eyewitness who videotaped the beating, says Quigg; Iranian student Neda Agha-Soltan, whose moment of death was filmed by an amateur cameraman, would have died even if he had stopped filming to help the physician who was rendering emergency medical care at the time and the brutal government oppression of the protest would have never found such dramatic resonance in the rest of the world.

British media consultant Kathryn Corrick looks critically at such arguments. Her wish is to see an “ethics of social reporting in real time,” i.e., clear rules as to when the use of micro-blogging services such as Twitter are inappropriate. She writes, “In some ways these problems aren’t new. Gossip and news have always traveled quickly. What’s different is the reach and speed now possible and the wider and deeper impact of that.”

“Soldier Girl” has at least already felt the results of the discussion she caused: her Twitter updates are no longer publicly available and her hospital photographs have been taken down.