-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [WI] CfP AJIS Special Section: Ethics in Social Media Research Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 14:41:50 +0200 From: Stefan Stieglitz stefan.stieglitz@uni-due.de Reply-To: Stefan Stieglitz stefan.stieglitz@uni-due.de To: wi@lists.kit.edu
*Call for Papers: Australasian Journal of Information Systems, **Special Section: Research on Applied Ethics - Ethics in Social Media Research *
*/Description/* The enormous growth of social media usage has led to an increasing accumulation of data. Social media platforms offer many possibilities of data formats, including textual data, pictures, videos, sounds, and geolocations (Stieglitz et al., 2018). This diverse social media data has spawned numerous attractive opportunities for researchers and practitioners to analyse social media users and their behaviour. In general, social media data can be used for the benefit of individuals and society. For example, by analysing social media data one might develop a better understanding about thoughts and preferences of people on such things as political or social topics. During crisis situations, social media analysis might help to identify useful information in real-time. For companies, social media could be investigated to identify new trends in client behaviour or ways to improve their products. Therefore, social media can be analysed by journalists, political parties and companies to target their products and ideas to social media users who are the most open to their messages. This form of microtargeting is one example that raises a scientific and societal discussion about the ethical implications of profiling social media users. While some users might enjoy being confronted with news, politics and advertisements which match their mindset, the profiling of social media users can be a double-edged sword. The often highly personal data i.e. extracted social media data, can range from sexual orientation and religious beliefs to ethnic background, and might be misused. For instance, undemocratic societies could be interested in identifying potential regime opponents, and also the leaders of democratic societies can misuse social media data to spread fake news and influence opinion formation processes, as was highlighted by the Cambridge Analytica Scandal. Social media analytics presents IS researchers with typical epistemic concerns. The way that conclusions are drawn from the data that is tracked by researchers can lead to inconclusive, inscrutable and misguided evidence (Mittelstadt et al., 2016). So there is a huge ethical concern for academics and industry alike, as wrong conclusions about individuals might be drawn, bearing in mind that social networks do not always reflect the society as a whole for e.g. the widely researched platform Twitter appears to attract a specific type of user (Boyd and Crawford, 2012). Researchers sometimes lose track of what are simple correlations of data and what can be interpreted as a causal connection (Illari and Russo, 2014). Researchers now find themselves in a conflict with ethical concerns and data protection regulations and research objectives including the analysis of personal data that may contribute to the greater good of society (Bunker et al., 2019). If this conflict limits the possibilities of researchers to investigate and understand social media platforms, it will increase the knowledge divide between platform providers that own and use all the data, and researchers who are limited by restricted access, terms of trade and ethical concerns. The analysis of social media data in crisis situations to support emergency service agencies, is one example where such research has a morally good aim. Researchers, but also journalists, politicians and managers need to ask what constitutes ethical rules and approaches of responsible social media analysis (Zook et al., 2017)? Besides ethical behaviour towards social media research, consequences for the researchers need also to be reflected. For example, analysing violent content (e.g. videos, images, texts) can have harmful psycho-social impact on the researcher. Information systems as a discipline has the ability to suggest and design technical solutions that can support ethical behaviour and avoid problematic actions (e.g. by digital nudging). But until now this has not been well considered within the design of software tools for researchers. Call for Papers This special section aims to develop scholarship which discusses and develops: a) the current status of ethics in social media analysis (SMA); b) the conflict between protecting the individual and research for a greater good; and c) the measures IS researchers should take to establish ethical guidelines for SMA. This special section also seeks to start a discussion on the role of ethics in social media research. While we are looking for scientific papers based on empirical studies we will also consider conceptual papers, researcher reflections on past projects, essays and opinion pieces that argumentatively tackle important issues which address the special section theme.
Typical topics of interest for this special section may be (but are not limited to):
* Current ethical practices in social media research i.e. problems and issues; * Theoretical consideration of ethics in social media research; * Pitfalls and challenges of strict ethical regulations; * Issues in the development of ethical frameworks; * Problems confronting researchers in the implementation of ethical research approaches in social media; * Digital nudging as an approach to promote ethical behaviour; * Psycho-social impact of social media research on the researcher; * Designing information systems to address ethical challenges; * Individual right to protection versus research for the greater good; and * Provision and use of effective financial, personal and technological resources to conduct ethical SMA.
Authors are encouraged to check with one of the special section editors, prior to paper submission, if they feel their paper may be at the boundary of the theme.
*/Key Dates /*
* Submissions Due: 21 September 2020 * 1st Round Acceptances: 20 December, 2020 * 2nd Round Review Submissions: 20 February, 2021 * Final Paper Acceptances: 20 March, 2021
Author guidelines including the URL are available at: http://journal.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/about/submissions
Information about the special section: https://journal.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/announcement/view/179
*/Editors/*
* Deborah Bunker, University of Sydney, Australia * Stefan Stieglitz, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany * Shirlee-ann Knight, Curtin University, Australia
*/References/*
* Boyd, D. and Crawford, K. (2012). “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon.” Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), p. 662-679. * Bunker, D., Stieglitz, S., Ehnis, C., and Sleigh, A. (2019). “Bright ICT: Social Media Analytics for Society and Crisis Management”. In Yogesh Dwivedi, Emmanuel Ayaburi, Richard Boateng, John Effah (Eds.) (Eds.), ICT unbounded : social impact of bright ICT adoption : IFIP WG 8.6 International Conference on Transfer and Diffusion of IT, TDIT 2019, Accra, Ghana, June 21-22, 2019, proceedings, (pp. 536-552). Cham: Springer. * European Union (2018) General Data Protection Regulation accessed at www.gdpr-info.eu http://www.gdpr-info.eu * Illari, P. and Russo, F. (2014). Causality: Philosophical Theory Meets Scientific Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. * Mittelstadt, B.,Allo, P., Taddeo, M., Wachter, S. and Floridi, L. (2016). "The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate” Big Data & Society, p. 1-21. * Stieglitz, S., Mirbabaie, M., Ross, B. and Neuberger, C.(2018) "Social media analytics – Challenges in topic discovery, data collection, and data preparation” International Journal of Information Management, 39, p.156-168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2017.12.002 * Zook, M., Barocas, S., Boyd, D., Crawford, K., Keller, E., Gangadharan, S.P., et al. (2017) "Ten simple rules for responsible big data research". PLoS Comput Biol 13(3): e1005399. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005399