After seeing friends sharing the pictures claiming to be the killers of 2-year-old Jamie Bulger, I waited for something to happen about it.

So last week Neil Harkins and Dean Liddle were given nine month sentences (suspended for 15 months) for publishing the photos – http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22310412

Of course, everyone who shared the pictures were all potentially breaking the injunction placed on revealing their identities. But as we have seen with previous cases of defamation ( Lord McAlpine – http://guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/nov/23/mcalpine-libel-bercow-monbiot-davies ) it’s not really possible to prosecute everyone involved in such social media antics.

Social media is hard to regulate. We know this. It has been responsible for breaking injunctions and anonymity –  e.g. http://dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2133792/Ched-Evans-rape-victim-named-abused-Twitter-girlfriend-stands-Wales-footballer.html

Peter Singfield talks here about the problem of online media and how Leveson failed to deal with it – http://holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2013/news/online-abuse-the-problem-leveson-didnt-deal-with/ .

He says: “We have users of social media, often, indeed usually, citizens of this country who are subject to its laws, using those services to publish and proliferate things that the established media would never go near.”

But apparently, this isn’t the only problem.

According to David Higgerson’s recent blog, journalists are misusing social media as well – http://davidhiggerson.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/why-manners-make-a-difference-when-reporting-from-social-media/

He writes of a growing problem in that tweets or facebook posts are now becoming part of articles in place of actual quotes. The warning here is that news articles are becoming less like news articles because of the “conversational” nature of Twitter or Facebook-style “statements”.

Obviously, they’re public platforms – if someone writes something of interest then as journalists we can’t just ignore it. But Higgerson suggests following it up to get proper quotes. We shouldn’t just go for the easy route of copying and pasting tweets in to our stories just because it’s there.