Media law in the social media age: how much do you know?

Publishing online is now so quick and accessible, it's easy to get caught in the moment and not realise there's only one publish button between you and a potential lawsuit.

Keeping up with the latest developments in media law in the age of social media is key to staying out of trouble, but how many journalists are actively doing this?

The results of a quiz recently created by Journalism.co.uk showed 90 per cent of respondents got a question about the Defamation Act 2013 wrong.

It asked: "On a story about a local businessman, a rival posts a number of comments with tales of mistreating workers and cost­cutting. The subject of the story and comments gets in touch, demanding that the comments are removed. Do you take down the post? Which most accurately describes the current law?"

The question dealt with section 5 of the Act, which details the website operators defence introduced by the statute to online media law last year. In this case, the right answer was "no, because the comment poster has identified himself".

Another question that proved troublesome related to copyright, asking whether someone could safely take images off Instagram and use them to illustrate a piece, as there was nobody pictured in the photos.

While most of the near 500 respondents knew the correct answer was "no", many fell for a trick answer using made-up Instagram terms of service to justify why someone could not use the images.

There is no such thing as first refusal of third party requests on Instagram as one popular answer suggested. Images posted to Instagram are not in the public domain either, as 6 per cent of respondents thought.

Instagram's real terms of use detail what happens to images after they are uploaded to the platform.

The right answer in this case was to find a royalty free image to use alongside the piece, to avoid copyright claims from the Instagram user.

One useful tool for this would be the Creative Commons search website, which helps journalists find images that are free to use under a Creative Commons license. Journalists could also, of course, contact the Instagram user to ask for permission, but this was not an option in the quiz.

The quiz results were not all doom and gloom however, as 76 per cent of respondents knew journalists should not tweet arguments made by barristers when the jury is not present in court.

And while the website operators' defence against defamation claims slipped under the radar, the majority of respondents could identify a defamatory statement, and knew what could land journalists and web users in trouble on this front.

Think you can do better in the quiz? You can still give it a go, we haven't spoiled all the results.

Journalism.co.uk is hosting an online media law refresher course on 29 October in London, going through the latest updates to the law, including the Defamation Act 2013.

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