Ethics of Social Media Research: State of the Debate and Future Challenges

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, researchers have been investigating into the ethical issues of Internet research. Among the first works, AoIR Research Ethics Recommendations of 2002 can be mentioned. Internet research ethics issues are still compelling, especially about social media, that are consolidated fields of research but with ethical open questions that will be more and more complex in the future. The chapter will go through these questions, focusing on selected keywords and summarizing for each one the debate, holes, and challenges for the future. The chapter will begin with a definition of the key terms, such as Internet research ethics, social media, and social network sites, as an important step for assessing the ethical issues around social media research. The chapter will then address traditional issues about ethics, like privacy, informed consent, anonymization, Institutional Review Board, and traceability, and then it will focus on new topics, like Big Data, data storage and retrieval, and crowdsourcing work. Besides the specific issues, also broader approaches to privacy will be presented, such as the ones of distributed morality and distributed responsibility, as framework under which build a dialogue between the many actors involved (researchers, companies, users, data, algorithms, programmers).