Abstract: This text explores the communication between Facebook users, such as single individuals, based on continuous monitoring of profiles of the author’s friends on the network including their contacts visible to her, without giving out names and personal data. What is taken into consideration are the topics that interest members of the social network, the manifested activities, their line of behaviour usually dictated by trends in the network and also the response on intriguing posts with visual and/or verbal content. The text does not focus on communication in the form of advertising messages, slogans and texts with representative information of company profiles, organizations, institutions and brands, but focuses on the individual and the ethics of interpersonal relations in the social site. The goal of the present research is to identify trends in Facebook communication, and as a result, to establish a kind of ethical code of standard in online behaviour, the need for which has clearly come as the existing codes of conduct in real life have proven inapplicable in most cases in social network environment in general and in Facebook in particular. It is the latter point, which is the main contribution of the text since it deals with a currently topical problem worldwide and an uncharted one from a scientific point of view in Bulgaria.
Key words: ethics, social networks, Facebook, interpersonal relations, codes of conduct, ethics online
Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, Issue 20, November 2015, rhetoric.bg/, journal.rhetoric.bg, ISSN 1314-4464