Over 2,000 years ago Aristotle wrote Nicomachean Ethics and defined the rules of conduct and virtue that are responsible to oneself and others. An individual's character and knowledge, is the meaning for the word ‘ethics’, which derives from the Greek word ‘ethos’. Human issues have not wavered much since Aristotle’s days at the Lyceum, but the modern-day platform in which the issues reside has created a gray area for legal and ethical challenges. Social media is now the public forum where people go to share their opinions on major issues and to receive information from others. Digital communication research is commonly done on social media platforms to study specific groups of people. Consumers of social media are not always aware when they are apart of a research study, which raises the question of privacy concerns. Research on social platforms can present real dangers to the recipients if ethical standards are not being upheld. Currently, there is not a defined guide to ethics when performing research on social media platforms, which leaves the researcher holding the moral compass to their discretion.
Three ethical challenges that are of concern within social media research are informed consent, privacy, and risk of harm. When an individual consents to use a social media platform, they are also consenting to the use of third parties accessing their information, which includes researchers. According to a Deloitte survey, 91% of people consent to terms of service without reading them. There are a lot of ethical questions regarding privacy, and researchers need to be held accountable when accessing the data of social media websites. Should the user be made aware every time that their comments, posts, and other personal information are being used for research and not in a one-time blanketed consent form when signing up? If data is being used from private groups or forums that are password-protected, why is it ok to be used for research? How safe are the private group participants if a third party can view their private discussions? The third ethical issue is the risk of harm to others, especially minors when research is being conducted on social media. A lot of minors participate in social media, and they are the most vulnerable when it comes to social media research. Not all minors who sign up for social media give out their actual age and a lot of the time their parents are not even aware of the platforms they are on. Individuals may openly discuss sensitive issues or make comments on forums not knowing they are being monitored by a researcher or journalist. The individual is either too immature to understand the consequences from their comments or too naive to think what they said is indeed private. For this reason, anonymity must be used with the data being used, even from public forums.
Legal issues can arise from social media research involving copyright, privacy, and emotional distress. Facts and ideas cannot be copyrighted, but “creative works of original authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression” can be copyrighted. Taking an original idea or intellectual property for research without permission can be viewed as a copyright infringement. The second legal issue that may be one of the most important of the three is privacy. Depicting someone in an inaccurate way and out of context quotes is called a false light, which falls under a privacy violation. The third legal issue that can arise is emotional distress. This is a challenging legal area because the defendant has a “duty of care and responsibility” to act responsibly. The researcher or journalist is responsible for their actions if they behaved with malice.
According to Pew Research Center, in 2021 seven out of ten Americans use social media. As of June 2022, the total number of people actively using social media was 4.62 billion! As this number continues to grow, monitoring and data collecting will increase. The blame can not always be put on the social media companies when the terms have been presented and are available. Unfortunately, many users do not read through each term or even understand them. While writing this article, I decided to look up Facebook's user privacy data policy. It was shocking to find out how Facebook can track my habits, likes, and even location, and I gave full consent to this. Social media research will continue to be conducted and platform users will continue to consent whether they realize it or not. Social media companies will protect the platform before they protect the user. People need to realize that privacy does not exist on social media, and that each platform is a profit generating business.
Reference:
Rosenberry, J., & Vicker, L. A. (2017). Applied mass communication theory: A guide for media practitioners (2nd ed.).
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