Digital citizenship: who are our models?

How do we learn to behave online? In the case of adults, unless we take classes about this concept, it is pretty much by trial and error, and by imitation of what others do.
We emulate what we see others do. For example, a few years ago I read about a writer called Roni Lauren who blogged about her work. She used pictures she found online and wrote a disclaimer about them following what others had written on their blogs. She thought she was fine until one photographer sued her. As she mentioned in her lessons learned, she paid for a pic she did not need. She could have taken a picture herself or resorted to the use of pics used under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. She strongly advices bloggers to use CC pics so they would not have to go through what she did.
What happens with Twitter users and followers? There are a few cases that are worth taking a closer look. In the UK in 2012, a couple of journalists made allusions about a person who may have incurred in misconducts without specifying his name but providing enough details that putting two and two together was not difficult. As a result, a series of twits emerged and were retwitted creating a great scandal about this situation. The person in question was wrongly accused and he decided to take legal actions against the journalists, the person who wrote the first twit, and those who retwitted it because they had not exercised their critical thinking wisely. The interesting thing about the action the victim took was to include those who had retwitted the information because they had not taken into consideration if someone could be hurt. The distinction he made was that those writers who had only 500 followers would pay a fine and make public apologies but those who had more followers would have to pay a greater fine in addition to apologizing. What's the point here? This case left a precedent that it is not ok to twit anything and that there could be legal repercussions if one proceeds without care.
From an educational standpoint, we also learn to tweet based on what others do. So it is necessary to discuss what we see, read, and the reactions that we notice when we see tweets that are not ok. As educators, we need to engage our students in exercises that involve writing tweets and discussing their ramifications.