Ethics and social media: Implications for sociolinguistics in the networked public

Abstract

As a popular agora for writing identity into being, the networked public of social media sites presents exciting and unprecedented possibilities for sociolinguistic research. At the same time, these sites raise a wealth of unfamiliar methodological and ethical issues, and debate concerning appropriate ethical measures for research targeting online discourse communities is emergent. One of the most pressing debates concerns the visibility of online interaction (i.e. its locus between the public and private ends of the continuum). Although they exist freely online, networked publics are not public forums. They are governed by both personal and communal norms, and they are networked. This combination of factors gives rise to unique ethical challenges, particularly in the case of Facebook, an accessible and data-rich, yet problematic, research site. This paper reviews the ethical difficulties presented by Facebook, and presents a framework for ethnographic sociolinguistic research that uses this site as a source of data. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.