Ethics on deleting blogs

I was stumbling along on trying to find a topic to write my blog on for this CSR class, until the genesis himself, Les Smith, gave me the perfect idea. In class one day Les explained to the class how to post blogs onto the schools blog page and remove them if necessary, due to a mistake or to make further corrections. I thought to myself, anyone with the login and password could go onto the blog page and delete anyone’s blog that they have worked hard to put together for marks to notice that when the times comes for the blog to be marked they receive a ZERO! Everyone in the class laughed and said who would do that? Well stealing is wrong and “unethical” so who would do that, lots of people.

In CSR we cover a major topic in this course and that topic is ethics. With ethics comes, trust, honesty and confidence. When establishing those key methods falls into doing the right thing. But what is the right thing?

With these blogs, any student that has chosen to do a blog for this course may do so as a choice from their course outline. With these blogs, they are meant to be an informative piece of information that the student finds interesting and feels that it would reflect on the course material in a different way that other students may find interesting.

When you post a blog, it is visible and accessible to anyone logged into the blog site, where as anyone could delete and remove any blog at any point. Most students would not do such a thing, however, it could happen. If there was an issue between two friends at school or in their personal life’s that made them dislike each other for a period of time, could go on their behalf and take that issue to the next level, deleting their personal blog off the CSR blog site so they would not receive a mark for the work that they performed.

Ethical or not, it could happen, and is it the correct way to get even with the friend?

In most cases the ethical approach to this situation would be to leave the others blog alone that they have personally worked hard towards and not affect their school marks and get back at them in a different way.

Another act that may occur is that someone is trying to play with the blog site to find out how it works because they skipped class or weren’t playing attention in class when Les was explaining how the CSR blog site works, would be accidently deleting another student’s blog.

In this situation what would the ethical approach to take? The student that made the mistake could tell Les Smith and explain the situation and find the student that wrote that blog and get them to re post it, and may potentially the student that accidentally deleted the post lost their own 5% on their blog because of what he or she did and were not paying attention in class when they were supposed to.

Another situation that may happen could be the student that deleted the post already knew who the blog belonged to and didn’t want to find the person because they thought they would have got beaten up or put in more trouble.

I found this topic interesting and a little different from the rest and hopefully you could post back on your thoughts and what is the ethical move to do in this situation!?

Cameron Head