The Importance of Ethics for Social Researchers in the Age of Social Media
The exploitation of human beings in the early 1900s, notably prisoners of war in Nazi concentration camps in WWII, raised concerns about ethical obligations. Efforts asserting the importance of ethical consideration emerged and led to the significant formation of the Nuremberg Code in 1947. The code established a set of universal research principles to protect the fundamental rights of freedom, all of which are intended to underlie social research to date.
The Nuremberg Code has since paved the way for new and improved ethical guidelines such as the Code of Ethics in an attempt to keep up with the dynamic nature of social research methods. These guidelines are an expression of professional responsibility and are ultimately put in place to ensure research is safe, respectful, responsible and of benefit to the wider community. Only in recent years has social media research developed into a worldwide phenomenon. Whilst it has provided unprecedented opportunities for research, it has also brought with it increased incidents of misconduct and ensuing social criticism.
The absence of ethical standards in the current regulatory environment is primarily to blame for this, with social media research bringing new challenges that obscure the “fundamental rights of human dignity, autonomy, protection, safety, maximization of benefits and minimization of harms”. Thus, the extent to which ethics should be considered important in relation to social media needs to be explored. Social media has become a powerful tool in the research context because it enables investigators to collect data from hard-to-reach populations by easing ways of locating, tracking and communicating with participants (Bhatia-Lin et al., 2019). There is evidence suggesting that up to 60 percent of offline research is not finished due to lack of enrolment, which at times results in research participants being exposed to risks and inconvenience for no benefit.
As Australian’s of many ages are beginning to engage in online communication, social media is becoming a tool to research participants of varying demographics in a detailed, cost and time effective manner. However, this rapidly evolving research landscape has since outpaced standard ethical regulations which were not designed to account for the diverse ways in which social media research can be carried out. The vacuum in policy has become problematic, leaving investigators and Institutional Research Boards (IRBs) to navigate the ethical, legal and social implications on their own. The adverse effect of having no standardised approach is evidenced through the recent social media scandals which have received dismay and anger from the public as well as raised legitimate concerns over how social media data is being used. One such incident occurred in 2012 with the accusation of Facebook stepping over an ethical boundary when the newsfeed of nearly 700, 000 users was altered to see if posts had the ability to vary emotions. People viewed this as an act of deception which had the potential to harm wellbeing.
Others scandals included OkCupid and Cambridge Analytica which sparked widespread distrust of social media. 64 percent of Americans surveyed did not trust social media sites to protect their data. Similarly, and interestingly to note, 70 percent of Australian researchers and ethics committee members conducted in a survey also stated they were concerned about their privacy on the internet.
