Information Ethics in the Context of Current Developments

The emergence of globalization due to information technologies and the changes and/or developments brought about by globalization require organizations to have more knowledge about ethics and therefore to be more interested in this issue. The use of information and communication technologies in organizations in accordance with ethical values is considered important in terms of the integrity, functioning, and efficiency of both employees and organizations. Individuals, managers, organizations, and researchers have important duties in the field of information ethics in order to prevent the making of difficult mistakes that will adversely affect individuals and organizations during the use of information technologies. In this context, information ethics has been examined in this study in the context of recent developments all over the world, especially the developments in the global COVID-19 pandemic process.

Some Thoughts Evoked by Peter Lor, Bradley Wiles, and Johannes Britz, “Re-thinking Information Ethics: Truth, Conspiracy Theories, and Librarians in the COVID-19 Era,” in LIBRI, March 2021

The paper offers some thoughts prompted by the research paper published by Peter Lor, Bradley Wiles, and Johannes Britz, “Re-Thinking Information Ethics: Truth, Conspiracy Theories, and Librarians in the COVID-19 Era,” in LIBRI, March 2021. It highlights two significant contributions, an analysis of the misinformation in the COVID-19 pandemic and the notion of alethic rights, the right of truth of patrons based on the work of D’Agostini. This reflection then situates the COVID-19 misinformation campaign within the broader disinformation ecology within which it exists. While it agrees that alethic rights are an important ethical framework, it wonders whether it practically advances work beyond that libraries and librarians are already doing, e.g., in collection decisions, approaches to reference questions, or library programming. It looks at the debate between John Swan and Noel Peattie on the inclusion of books representing outright lies in the collection (e.g., Holocaust denial). It then contrasts a right to information and authorities propagating and validating that information with a right to misinformation and authorities for propagating and validating that misinformation that exists within disinformation ecologies. The problem of truth, its authorities and its context appears to be more complicated than an appeal to alethic truths: for example, liberals and conservatives differ on the meaning of a rational consensus on contentious political matters, such as climate change. Given the dire consequences of misinformation on democracies and public health, an appeal to professional neutrality is woefully inadequate. There must be proactive resistance, if not outright repudiation.