An estate agent in a small coastal town becomes infamous overnight after posting a racist rant on Facebook. A much-quoted economist blurs into the background after his views on race and the economy provoke a storm on Twitter. A widely-read sportswriter gets the boot from his newspaper after an ill-considered tweet about cricket.
On social media networks, designed to bring people together, bridge differences, and build communities online, rash actions can ruin reputations and change lives for all the wrong reasons.
Should we be afraid of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram? Should we play it safe and communicate only face to face, in the real world? No. But we do need to learn lessons and put best practise into practise, and nobody knows how to get the message across better than Emma Sadleir.
Consultant, speaker, author of “Don’t Film Yourself Having Sex”, Emma has turned her legal speciality – social media law – into a powerful platform for education and awareness.
In the office, at home, on your laptop, on your phone, digital content can be dangerous content, warns Emma, whose case files are full of stories of tweeters, Facebookers, Instagrammers, Whatsappers and Snapchatters who found that out the hard way.
Short of switching off, unplugging, and becoming a digital hermit, the best way to make the most of our ever-changing age of mass communication is to exercise due caution and put common sense into practise. In this fascinating and revealing chat with Ruda, Emma tells us why and how.
Transcript:
R: Hello, and welcome to another session at the Change Exchange. Our guest today … Emma Sadleir. Lawyer. And she specialises in social media. But you just happened upon law … You were standing in a queue at Wits to register for something else? And then?
E: You’ve done very good research. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I finished school. I really was a very focused student at school. I was very ambitious – I got involved in everything. I did public speaking on a national level, and debating internationally and I really wanted to get very good marks, and then I finished school and I had kind of no idea what was next. And I knew that I didn’t want to do science again – I had been offered a full scholarship to study actuarial science at Wits. But I knew that I didn’t want to do science. But beyond that I didn’t have much of an idea. And my mom actually got fed-up one day and she just went to Wits herself. For my mom – she lives in a very parochial life … For her, five kilometres from our house is quite an outing. And off she went to Wits and came home with the forms and I registered for a BA and a BCom, and on registration day …
R: Both?
E: Both. And on registration day I decided to go for the BA because it sounded … To be honest … A little easier. I hadn’t done accounting before. And I was just totally overwhelmed. I was totally unprepared for the experience. I think that I had been very ill equipped for what happened after school, as fab as school was. And I met …
R: In what way? What do you mean?
E: Well I think that there was just very little … And I feel the same about law school – when I finished law school I didn’t even know what the difference was between an attorney and an advocate. And I had done very well, academically, so I really should have known. And I felt the same about school. I felt that there wasn’t enough emphasis on what next and where I was going to go and what I was going to study. I think had I taken the right subjects halfway through high school I would have become a doctor, but I didn’t have the right subjects when I finished. So I think that’s changing. Certainly the number of people who ask to come and job shadow me on a daily basis in South Africa certainly suggests to me that the schools are really starting …
R: And there’s more of an awareness …
E: To increase that kind of … That side of it.
R: But you’re actually learning, studying in order to do something.
E: Absolutely. And you know, I think … I always describe myself as the luckiest girl in the world. So I’m thrilled that the career happened as it did. I’m very glad that I almost didn’t have to make any significant choices, they were kind of made for me. So I went and I registered for a BA and I remember standing in the queue, and looking at all these subjects, just feeling totally overwhelmed, and I met a friend of mine in the queue who was … He was going to … He was actually … I was head girl at my school and he was head boy. And he told me that he was going to do law as part of the BA and I was like: “Wow, you can do law as a BA!” I really was that clueless! Anyway, I registered and started and I just loved the law. I absolutely loved it, right from the …
R: What do you love about it?
E: I loved the reason. I loved the stories, because just about all law in South Africa requires an element of storytelling. And because we rely so heavily on case law, I think I’m quite nosy and I quite like the gossip. So I always found it fascinating to sit down and read these cases about what people were going through in life. So I think that was part of it. And I just loved being surrounded by clever people. And there were very many clever people in the law department at Wits and I always say if you’re the cleverest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. And I think that was very apposite for my time at Wits.
R: And then you started at Webber Wentzel immediately. How did that change your life? Do you think that made a difference? To start with one of the big companies?
E: Ja, I think I was so lucky. Webber Wentzel was my first choice, it was the only law firm that I applied to, which was a big risk. So I was very grateful when I got in there. And it really is just one of the best. I think that all the law firms deal with very interesting cases. I just was incredibly lucky to land up in the department that I landed up in. When I joined Webber Wentzel I thought that I’d get into mergers and acquisitions. I don’t think I even really knew what that meant. But I landed, luckily, with Dario Milo, who is the best media lawyer in the country – I would say by a very long way. And I absolutely fell in love with the law. From my very first day where I was dealing with a case that I will never, ever forget, which involved me phoning the IT department to get them to unlock my computer because I had to go on to all of these sex chat rooms and things. And I just was hooked. It was so interesting, and so current, it was so much fun.
R: Tell us more about that case?
E: Well, I can’t talk in too much detail about it, but it was a privacy and dignity case about somebody who had been featured in an article, in a newspaper and had said that he was effectively outed in the newspaper as homosexual. And the facts of the case were very interesting and I had to spend a lot of time researching what the sentiment was about the case and it was just … I remember just feeling electric and I came home from work that day and I was hooked.
R: People think of law as quite dry and quite … You know … It’s all about the legal principles and big words and dusty tones. You don’t find it so?
E: Well, I don’t. But I do … I think the most glamorous, interesting sector of law that one can possibly do … I started off in media law, I did a quick rotation at Webber Wentzel in the mergers and acquisition department, and then knew I wanted to stay on as a media lawyer. So I went back to Dario’s team. And it was fabulous then. It’s become even more interesting with the advent of social media, because when I started my career there wasn’t any social media. There was … People were starting to get on to Facebook a little, and then I think I was just in such a unique position that I had been in the media law department. I had been working in the field of media law. I had done a lot of work on defamation, a lot of work on privacy. All the limits to freedom of expression. I’ve done a lot of educational work with journalists, because Webber Wentzel’s primary media clients are the big media houses and journalists.
R: Ja, I know them from Carte Blanche, of course.
E: Exactly. They are Carte Blanche’s lawyers. And I did a lot of educational work. And then I went and I studied in London. And I … It was just when everything was starting to shift from the traditional media onto social media. There was the Twitter bomb trial, which had happened in England. I remember going to meetings with Julian Assange about Wikileaks, and it was the most academically indulgent year to go and study for a year after working as hard as I had at a big law firm – because you do work hard. The lifestyle is tough, it’s long hours – it’s interesting work and there are brilliant people all around you. But it is a very difficult lifestyle to choose long term.
R: And what made you decide to take that year in London?
E: Again, spur of the moment. Luck. I remember I went outside for lunch and a friend of mine, Devisha, had just been given acceptance letters to Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics. And I looked at her and I thought that sound fun. And we had just been admitted – we had just finished our year of articles and I went upstairs and I did a bit of googling, and the only university which was still taking applications was the London School of Economics. And I mean … LSE … I didn’t even know they had a legal department, to be honest! And one of my other bosses, Pamela Stein, had done her master’s at LSE. And there was one specifically catered to what I do – it was a master’s in information technology media and communications law. And I just thought it can’t be. How can it be? And to be third … There were only three of us on the course who did this specialisation. So the fact that they offered it was incredibly lucky as well. And …
R: Why did you go the academic route?
E: Ja, well …
R: Why did you feel that you wanted that?
E: I knew that I needed a bit of time out. I felt like I had been pretty serious. As I said, I took school very seriously, I took university very seriously – five years. And I’d never taken a gap year, and I just had this feeling that I should go and do something before it was too late. Before I got stuck in this lifestyle of working in a big corporate law firm. So I actually remember saying to myself if I didn’t get into LSE – because this was the only place that was still accepting applications – then I would go and do a cooking course in Ireland at Ballymalloe. I had two computers at Webber Wentzel … Two screens, and I had the Ballymaloe cooking course on the one screen and I had the LSE subject choices on the other screen. And then it all happened very quickly. I got the acceptance letter, I got a full scholarship from the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust and Webber Wentzel were incredibly supportive as well and contributed to the expenses and kept my position available for me while I was away.
R: Tell me more about that year in England, because it really sounds as if you came across stuff that just opened up this whole field?
E: Well I think it was just when everything was turning. As I say, so … In order to get on top of this new field … The laws are the same. So simply, what the law says is that as soon as content has been seen by one other person, then the laws kick in. So what I say on a WhatsApp group to five people, what I say on Facebook to 500 people, what I say on Twitter to 30 000 people … As soon as it’s been seen by one other person, then in the eyes of the law that content is treated as if you published it on the front page of a newspaper. So all these laws that I have been dealing with for so long suddenly had much more general application, because suddenly with the advent of social media everybody who had an internet connection had instant access to an international, public, permanent platform. And that’s a great power.
R: So if I send you a WhatsApp – just to you – then I’ve published it?
E: Well, no. Because under RICA – the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act – a direct communication … That’s a communication between you and the other person. You have an expectation of privacy over that communication. Unless it’s from a work device or over the work network or in the course and scope of your employment, because then Big Brother can watch you, even if it’s a private communication. But say, you and I were just chatting on WhatsApp and maybe I say something that you find hilarious and you take a screenshot of it. And then you send it to somebody else. And they send it on and send it on and then it gets back to the boss that I’ve been talking about what a complete idiot he is, then I can still get disciplined as a result of that content even though you’ve breached my privacy along the way. And that’s why I always say digital content is dangerous content. I used to go around giving these talks about how … If you wouldn’t put it on a massive billboard with a huge photograph of your face, your name, the name of your employer and whatever you’re about to say online, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, then don’t say it. Because the laws are the same. The disciplinary consequences are the same, the harm to your reputation is the same. But my message has changed. My message now, is if you wouldn’t want it on that billboard, if you wouldn’t want your boss, your potential employer to see it, your children to see it, then don’t let it exist in digital format. Because when something is digital, it’s out of your control.
R: Write it by hand on a piece of paper.
E: Say it to someone’s face and make sure they’re not recording. It is the only way. Because phones get lost. Phones get stolen. Phones get hacked. We saw that with Jennifer Lawrence. She had these naked pictures of herself. She’d taken these photos, she looked at them and she thought this isn’t for me, this sexting thing. She deleted them. But for the four seconds those photos were on her phone, they were automatically backing up to her iCloud, and her iCloud got hacked. So we … I think … Need to learn a lot. I think because of these high profile cases of social media happening in the last few weeks in South Africa, then I think people are learning from experience and learning that there are limits to the right to freedom of expression, but I think we’re still facing a problem of desperate ignorance about what it means to have this power on social media and how badly things can go wrong. And how quickly.
R: Tell me about your move. You came back from London, you went back to Webber Wentzel for a while, and then you took the plunge to step out there and start your own consultancy. How did that happen?
E: So I went … Again … Magically! So I went back to Webber Wentzel, I was back there for a year and a half, and I was suddenly just getting more and more requests to do educational work. Giving talks at schools, particularly, I realised just what crisis so many people were in, because … And I really feel it came from the children, because I feel like by giving children cellphones and access to these tools and not educating them about how badly things could go wrong, I thought we were failing them. Giving them rope to hang themselves.
R: There was such a huge gap, because the parents didn’t know what they were dealing with.
E: The parents didn’t know …
R: And the kids access it just like … anything else that they would access. It’s just a matter of course.
E: The parents didn’t know, the teachers didn’t know … I remember receiving a phone call from a father who was absolutely hysterical. His son went to one of the best private schools in South Africa, and his son had started a parody account in the name of one of the teachers, and was facing expulsion a couple of months before the end of his matric year. And his father was beside himself. It was on Twitter. And he said: “I don’t even know what this Twitter is!”
R: What did this kid post?
E: Again, I mean, I feel a bit boring coming on here because I can’t talk about these things in too much detail, but it was incredibly inappropriate, offensive and objectionable.
R: So he pretended to be the teacher.
E: Ja, he pretended to be the teacher, created this whole account and used photographs that he shouldn’t have used and I just thought to myself why hasn’t someone told them that this wasn’t a good idea?
R: You wouldn’t do it in the school newspaper, so …
E: Exactly. And that I think has to be the test. So I gave my first school talk while I was still at Webber Wentzel, and then something just clicked. I did a big interview on Carte Blanche where … It was at the same time … It was the same week of the Oscar Pistorius shooting. And it was a very popular Carte Blanche, many people had tuned in to watch the Oscar Pistorius insert and then mine, fortuitously was just afterwards. And the feedback that I got from that show, I realised just how desperate people were for the message. And I resigned and people at Webber’s thought I was mad. They thought that it was going to be difficult, that it’s a big bad place out there. A big bad world, and that it was going to difficult to find clients. And I suppose when people ask me what’s the worst part of my job, it’s that I feel that I’m scaring people off otherwise really incredible tools. And I think testament to how incredible these platforms can be, is that when I left Webber’s, I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have an office. I didn’t have employees. I didn’t have … And I never spent …
R: A client.
E: I didn’t have a client! And I never spent a cent on advertising, I never spent a cent on marketing, and I have been busy every single day for the last two and a half years since I left. And that’s solely through my presence on social media. I’ve styled myself as the expert on social media law in South Africa, solely through my Twitter account. People know where to contact me. Anything that happens from a social media law point of view … People send it to me: “Hey, Emma Sadleir, have you seen this?” People know where to find me. And I think … You know, I can sit in my office and follow a court case that’s going on on the other side of the world in blow-by-blow detail, just looking at what’s going on on Twitter. So as much as I try to scare people about these platforms – and I do try and scare people – I describe what I do with the children as the modern-day equivalent of the drug talk. I remember a guy coming to speak to us when I was at school, and I think he was a heroin addict. And I think that he’d had some bad trip and thought that he was an orange and tried to peel himself. Now whether this was actually true or not, it stuck with me.
R: Did it scare you off heroin?
E: I’ve never taken drugs! And I always just think to myself if I could just do some of this for the children that I speak to … Because lives really do get ruined. I had five clients last year who had to change their names because of content that comes up when you google them. Mostly revenge porn victims and mostly children. You send a picture of yourself naked to one person, and the next day the whole school’s got it and it’s on the internet and your name is tagged and I google you and this is what comes up. It’s those kind of long term reputational … sometimes the reputational harm cannot be undone and the internet is a permanent place, which is why I think education and prevention is better than cure.
R: In the process, you have become a very public persona. How have you dealt with that? Because it is a loss of privacy in itself?
E: It is to a certain extent. I certainly don’t think of myself as famous in any way. I think of myself as a law nerd. And I don’t think that I’m a particularly recognisable person. I think that people know … Sometimes when I tell people what my name is, they say: “Oh, I’ve seen you on Twitter.” But I don’t think there was a sort of sudden shoot to fame. And I think that what’s important is to remember the way that South African law is formulated in terms of privacy, is the more you look after your privacy, the more of it you have. And so I really take that to heart. You know, as much as I use Twitter and I use it often, I only use it for a professional point of view. You will never see anything about my private life on Twitter. I always say Facebook is for your friends, Twitter is for the people you want to be your friends … But I do feel like a lot of people have got it wrong when it comes to privacy. I think of a platform like Instagram, particularly. You know, the kind of content that people put on Instagram is very intimate content. It’s pictures of themselves, it’s pictures of their families, it’s pictures of their friends, their holidays, their pets … And for me there is no reason why every person in the world should be able to see that content. And what I’m noticing with Instagram is that the whole thing is becoming a popularity contest. Particularly with the children. It doesn’t matter who’s following you, as long as somebody is following you. It doesn’t matter who liked that photo as long as somebody liked it. And I think we are breeding a generation of addicts. They’ve just done some really interesting work in the States on girls between the ages of 12 and 14, and what happens in their brain – and apologies for the very layman understanding of quite technical issues… They assess what happens in the brain of a girl between the ages of 12 and 14 when they get that notification that somebody has followed them or liked one of their photos. And simply put the dopamine hit, the chemical reaction in the brain …
R: The pleasure centre …
E: Is identical to the chemical action that takes place when an addicted gambler is in the casino pressing that slot machine. So when we say flippantly we’re addicted, I think we genuinely are addicted. I certainly feel quite addicted to most of my devices.
R: You said something really interesting earlier about … What you said now … The more you guard your privacy, the more of it you have. And what that means with different people like JK Rowling and the Kardashians.
E: Ja, Kim Kardashian. So what I was saying is that the way the South African law is formulated, is that if you can show that you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a particular set of circumstances, and somebody infringes on that privacy, then you can sue them. Everybody has the right to privacy. Everybody has the right to freedom of expression. It’s not that one right is more important than the other right. It’s a balancing act. And we have laws in place which give us a pretty good guideline as to where we draw that boundary between the right to freedom of expression on the one hand, and the right to privacy on the other. So simply put, if you could show that you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a particular set of circumstances, you can sue somebody if they infringe it. So, for example, if I wake up tomorrow and there’s a picture of me … A naked photograph of me on the front page of the newspaper, then I would be upset about that. That would infringe my privacy, I could sue. When it comes to the kind of content that we’re putting on social media, the more we share, the less privacy we have. So if you’re not on social media at all, you have a higher expectation of privacy than somebody who is on social media. If you’re a celebrity, you have a lower expectation of privacy than somebody who is not a celebrity. It’s all very subjective.
R: So if I have posted pictures of my child on wherever, Instagram or whatever, and then a magazine publishes a picture of him without either of us approving it, then I don’t really have a leg to stand on?
E: Well, not really. You’re dictating the privacy rights of your children. You’re dictating your own privacy rights as well. If you have an open Instagram account and you are taking 50 pictures of yourself a day, and you have no privacy settings and you use hashtags and you just hashtag #teamfollowback and #likeforlike and you don’t care who’s following you, as long as somebody’s following you. Then your expectation of privacy over those photos is much lower than my right to privacy with those photos. Because I don’t use hashtags, I have a very private account and I am very careful about who I let follow me … So the JK Rowling example is that she’s the author of Harry Potter, she’s one of the most famous people in the world. She has never shared a photograph of her children anywhere on the internet. You will not see a photograph of her children. She’s never Tweeted a picture, Facebooked a picture, Instagrammed a picture … If the paparazzi takes a picture of her kid, she sues the pants off them. What that means, is that if the Hello! magazine publishes a picture, the faces of the children will be pixelated because the mother has created an expectation of privacy. And if you compare that to somebody like Kim Kardashian and her daughter North West … She’s sharing hundreds of photographs a year of that child. Before she has the autonomy to decide, she really has very little expectation of privacy. I would hasten to say no right to privacy. She’s basically tabloid fodder, and she’s a child. So I think these are very important learnings for parents that you’ve got to start thinking about the legacy you’re leaving for your children and creating privacy rights … Not just for yourself, but for your children as well.
R: Moving on to personal life. You’re a single, professional woman. What’s the perfect partner? What do you dream about?
E: Well, I think people think of me as quite hardcore, strong, feminist, professional, very intimidating, and I’m not at all. And I’m actually, I think, a puppy. I’m very vulnerable and I think my ideal partner is just somebody who is incredibly supportive. Somebody that I feel safe with. Somebody who …
R: Safe in what way?
E: You know, I always think home is not a place, it’s a person. And I think if you can really just be yourself with somebody and you don’t have to worry about trying to be somebody that you’re not … I think that’s possibly the ideal. I would like to have children. Very much. I think it’s difficult. And I think I made a good move moving away from the corporate lifestyle, because it’s very, very difficult to work in a big law firm and have a family. So the lifestyle that I have now, is much more accommodating. I know I can go for a horse riding lesson at 10 on a Tuesday, and if I was still working for a big law firm that wouldn’t have been possible. So my time is much more my own, and because I do so much educational work, I’ve actually stopped taking on a lot of cases, because I’m out of the office all the time. I speak to a school just about every day. I speak to corporates. I do a lot of educational work. A lot of training about social media, about the laws, about the disciplinary consequences, about how to look after your reputation.
R: But that means that you can organise your diary.
E: Exactly. So I travel a lot. I’ve done a lot of work internationally. A lot into Africa, and I travel most weeks. I think last year I didn’t spend more than three days consecutively at home, from the 4th of January to the 29th of November … So I’m trying to be a little bit more careful about making sure that I spend more time at home and managing my life a bit better, so I’ll now do a week in Cape Town and do 22 talks in one week, instead of going down to Cape Town for a single talk. So it’s that kind of thing that I’ve got to get a little bit stricter about. But it’s good. It suits me, it’s fun and I think I would go mad if I had to do the same thing every day. So luckily there are always new examples coming out …
R: So you need a partner who will stand next to you and enjoy his life while allowing you to do the same?
E: Ja, and I mean I would have to be intellectually stimulated. I don’t think that I could date anybody who I didn’t think was much cleverer than me. I need to be stimulated all the time and particularly now, because I work on my own. It’s very different. When I was at Webber Wentzel I was surrounded by countless, brilliant people who I could go and knock on their door at any time of the day or convince them to go out for lunch with me even if they had too much work, and just be really stimulated. And now, because a lot of the work that I do is travelling to talks … I spend a lot of time on my own, and so I need somebody who is going to challenge me and who is going to really stimulate me intellectually as often as possible.
R: And when you come home? What is home like?
E: Home is chaos. I grew up on a big farm … My mum owns a children’s horse riding stable, so we’ve got 40 horses at home, and six dogs and chickens and chaos. There are always loads of people. My dad is loud and fun and we always have people staying … And that was how I grew up, so that’s really what I would like to emulate. I like to have the chickens in the garden where I can go and collect my eggs. And I’ve got to have animals and I’ve got to have people. I love being surrounded by people, so I love the idea that a friend driving past can just pop in for a cup of tea at any stage, so that’s …
R: Do you work from home?
E: I do. Well, I mean I say I work from home, but I work in between talks at coffee shops, I work from my cellphone, I work on aeroplanes … I spend my life trying to have as little structure as possible. Some people crave structure, some people love it and need it. And I love that every day is completely different. I love that there is no ‘this is what I do on a Monday’ and ‘this is what I’m doing on a Wednesday’. So I kind of work on the move. I also … As I’m in control of my diary, if I want to go away for a week, then I just put a line through my diary for that week and then I just don’t take talks. So I feel a bit like I’ve won the lottery when it comes to my profession, it’s become very successful and great fun and the most important thing for me I think is that I walk away from those talks really feeling like I maybe just helped a little bit. And particularly the questions that come to me afterwards, because I sometimes … I’ll be at a school talk and I’ll … The schools are getting me to speak to kids from grade four now, which is nine, ten years old. And I hate it, because I’ve got to talk about sexting … The youngest case of sexting that I dealt with last year was a nine-year-old. So these kids are so little and I don’t want to talk to them about these issues. And so, often during the talk I feel like this is so hard, this is so awful. But then the questions that they come and ask me afterwards, I realise just how important it is. And the children all know that they can contact me, that I’ll help wherever I can with bullying issues, with sexting issues … Bullying has got so much worse. Bullying has always been around, so I think a lot of parents don’t take it that seriously, because it’s always been there.
R: ‘I was also unhappy at school.’ Shut up and get on with it.
E: It’s part of the game. Stand up and fight. But bullying has got worse, because it’s often anonymous. It’s faceless. And you know how much easier it is to say something horrific to your cellphone screen than to the face of a crying child. It’s public. If somebody called me a slut at school, I would have been beside myself. The only people who would know about it, were the five people who were with the near shot, and now it’s public. Everybody can see it, because it happens on these very, very public platforms. And it’s permanent. Even if you were being bullied 24/7 while you were at school, you could still leave school at the end of the day and take off your school uniform and forget about it for the night, for the weekend, and now these children have their phones with them all the time. And that bullying follows them, and the torment of 24/7 bullying I think is something that people have no idea how serious it can be. And on that, I’ve got to get it in in every interview I do – if you have children, do not let them sleep with their cellphones next to their bed. It’s my pet topic at the moment – I speak to children as young as ten years old who have iPhones and they are allowed to them 24 hours a day. And these kids are on them, and if you got your phone next to you when you go to bed at night and you wake up and you check the time and you’ve got messages and then three hours later you’re still on it or you’re playing games or you’re listening to music and these little children … They need to sleep, and just the stimulation of the light is enough to really, really compromise them. And how well they can function the next day. So please, buy your children and old-school alarm clock and take away their cellphones when they go to bed at night.
R: You don’t sound like someone who makes five year plans, but is there something that you really want to achieve?
E: Well I definitely want to have a family. I definitely want to have children. I would like to have a big warm home full of chaos – that is a goal. I would love to still be in South Africa. I think people are feeling a bit depressed about being in South Africa. I am an optimistic South African and nobody really wants to leave. So I hope that it’s here and I hope that it involves horses and I … You know, people said to me when I started on my own … And I still went around and I met a few key people in the sort of digital media world. And they all said: “What do you think you’ll do in five years’ time? Where do you see this business going?” And I had to say to them five years ago my business didn’t exist.
R: ‘I simply do not know.’
E: I have absolutely no idea. There’s this wonderful, wonderful YouTube clip of … I have briefly forgotten his name, does that have to happen? But that wonderful ginger Australian who … Tim Minchin – there you go … And he gave this wonderful speech at a graduation ceremony and he talked a lot about being micro-ambitious. Focus hard on what you’re doing right now. My big project for this year is a new book. I would like to write a book on privacy, because I think we’re getting it wrong. It’s called the privacy revolution and I’m almost finished with it. So that will be my next big project, and I would like to start an online academy. So I just don’t get around the schools enough. There are too many of them. I feel bad charging them because I feel it’s so important and so many schools just don’t have the funds …
R: I skipped over your book! How did that happen? What is it called?
E: It’s called “Don’t film yourself having sex and other legal advice for the age of social media”, and it’s a codification of everything that I talk about. It’s social media and the workplace. It’s social media and children. It’s general stuff like what happens to your social media accounts after you die and how to stay safe online, dating, and social media and news gathering. And then about a quarter of it is just explaining to people what the laws are. What does …
R: Why write a book in the 2015?
E: Well, I thought about doing a PhD, and then I thought that the book would probably fill the same desire in me to produce the work … It’s a real feeling that people need direction and part of it is that I can’t go and speak to every single person in South Africa as much as I really like to.
R: Is this a missionary zeal …
E: It really … It really does feel a bit like that sometimes. As ridiculous as it sounds, but my heart breaks because so often … I am the first point of call when people have got it wrong or being the victim of something on social media. And I actually dedicated my book to a girl who I call “Miss K”, who is exactly the same age as me. Professional, she went to school in Johannesburg and went to UCT and she dated this guy for … I think she dated him for about seven months. And one night he filmed them having sex. She had no idea. She was absolutely oblivious to the fact that he was filming her. He had his laptop next to the bed, ostensibly to play music. And he positioned himself in such a way that his face wasn’t in the shot and they broke up and … He was a foreigner … He left the country. And a few months later she got a hysterical phone call from a friend saying: “Have you googled yourself?” And she had a very unique African name. And she did this, and the first result was her Facebook account, her second result was her LinkedIn account, and the third to 300 results was this video that this ex-boyfriend of hers had taken – the sex tape – on all these porn sharing websites. And she came to me absolutely hysterical, and I just felt totally helpless, because there are legal avenues that you can go down …
R: You can get him, but you can never take it back.
E: You can never take it back, but also because he had left the country, it wasn’t even going to take him … But the very worst outcome would be that her parents would find out. Very conservative family, and so she landed up changing her name. There were legal options, but I’m afraid just about all the legal options that you can invoke have the net-effect that more people find out about the content. And so … We call this the Barbara Streisand effect. I’m sure you’ve heard of it – years ago Barbara Streisand discovered that there was an aerial photograph of her house on the internet, and she was furious. It was on the California Coastal Guard website, absolutely beside herself. So she rushed off to court on an urgent basis to have this photograph removed, and when she launched the proceedings in court, four people had seen the photo: Barbara Streisand herself, two lawyers, and one unidentified person. And by the end of the urgent application 600 000 people have seen it. And often that’s the case. So as much as there are legal options available, we don’t really have the sufficient cloak of anonymity that protects victims. So she changed her name, and for me that was the final straw. I needed to write this book. I needed the message to go out there. I feel so helpless when people phone me, so I am on an educational mission and I will continue it. The more avenues I find to spread the message of social media responsibility, the better. Because when people phone me to say they have been fired from their job or been expelled from school, they’re being sued … At that stage there is so little I can do.
R: Thank you so much – that was fascinating. And all of the very, very best on your missionary journey.
E: Thank you so much for having me.
R: We’ll meet again on the Change Exchange.
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