In light of the social properties of the internet, I propose that some activities which may have formerly been considered social acceptable, at least marginally, should henceforth be considered unacceptable -- "big no-no"s -- major breaches of ethics:
- trolling
- deliberately spamming strangers
- exception: other people in some organization with you are not strangers, unless you are spamming them about something totally unrelated, i.e. if you work on wall street and you spam your coworkers with a sales pitch for pharmaceuticals, that's still spam
- using the internet to make a concerted effort to shame a person. Examples:
- someone makes a stupid job application video. this is forwarded to other people in their industry, hurting the person's job application chances, not only at the place they applied, but also at other places
- someone makes a video of someone else doing something socially unacceptable, then posts it on a website to shame that person
- someone admits to being an FBI informer, and then other people register that person's name as a website in order to "get the word out"
- a group of kids make a website or discussion forum to ridicule a kid they don't like
- exception: you can take a video of someone breaking the law and then send it to law enforcement (or breaking some other rule and then sending it to some authority). you can also make a database of known FBI informants. the difference between these actions and the sins is that, in the sinful cases, you attempted to get the attention of third parties who previously might not have been looking for a list of people breaking that particular law.
- note that the point here is that EVEN IF there is broad consensus deserves shame, it is STILL WRONG to shame them in this way
in addition, i propose the following lesser sins (minor ethical breaches):
- breaking down barriers between a person's personal and professional life
- example: a prospective employer looks at a person's pictures on a social networking site, and decides not to hire them
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