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
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
- 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