In the world of Instagram, there's a hashtag often used with photographs people are particularly proud of: #nofilter. It's a little strange given professional photographers, cinematographers and videographers all use filters.
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Photographs benefit from filters. They produce images that more closely resemble what our eye sees. The same applies to professional journalism, which when boiled down involves taking information, passing it through a stringent set of filters, and then publishing or broadcasting it.
Those journalistic filters involve fact checks, language checks, analysis and context.
When Wikileaks founder Julian Assange took it upon himself to publish reams of classified documents, he did so without a journalistic filter. It was a massive data dump; it was not journalism. And it put in great peril those agents and informants named in it.
The same happens on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter when "information" is broadcast with no fact checking, and no consideration of defamation or vilification.
Community Facebook pages can be a particularly dangerous minefield, especially when it comes to matters before the court. Links from news sources are often shared, attracting comments that are either defamatory or in contempt of court. Here in the mainstream media, we'd be rich if we had a dollar for every time we received comments along the lines of "name and shame them" attached to stories in which, legally, we cannot. Often this is because naming the perpetrator will identify the child victim.
And, of course, that's not the only problem with unfiltered material published on social media.
Because it allows people to comment immediately, with no pause for thought, social media is often a nasty place. People are tempted to rush to judgment, spread wildly false rumours or become abusive.
It's not all gloom and doom, however. Social media has played a constructive role in raising awareness around certain issues that needed to be brought out of the shadows. The #metoo movement cast a long overdue light over sexual harassment, for instance. Where it failed, however, was in filtering truth from untested allegation.
At the end of the day, filters maintain social cohesion. Manners are filters. Thought is a filter. Consideration for others is a filter. A #nofilter world is not that appealing.
