Ethics, Privacy, and Accountability Online

     Kramer et al. conducted a study via Facebook to see if emotion states can be transferred between people on the Internet. They manipulated what posts half a million Facebook users would see when they logged on to their Facebook newsfeed and found that emotion states can in fact been transferred by viewing positive or negative posts. Despite not doing anything illegal, there was a huge uproar about this study and the invasion of privacy, raising the question of when do participants need to be told they will be included in a study and when is consent just wrapped into the general Facebook agreement to consent to research purposes. Markham et al. argue that each experiment needs to be reviewed on a case by case basis because the opportunities to do research online are limitless and one set of ethics will not fit everything. But this of course, leads to a large gray area where it is up to people’s interpretation whether or not consent is necessary.

     With the abundance of social media sites in today’s world, I understand the desire of wanting to utilize these online profiles for research. Nonetheless, something just does not sit right with me when I think about researchers being able to manipulate what I see on my Facebook newsfeed or collecting data on my internet habits. The more I think about it, though, the more I question if it is actually unethical. When I think about what a similar experiment would look like in the physical world, I don’t think there would be an uproar. Manipulating what posts people see on their Facebook newsfeed to test the effect on emotion in my mind would be similar to putting up a negative or positive sign on the entrance to a building and testing how that affected people’s emotions. I think if this type of experiment was carried out, people would not protest. To me, I would imagine there was so much uproar about the Facebook study because people view Facebook as a private space. Even though it is public, it seems like your own little world that you have control over. In the article on Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research, there is a discussion about considering if things are public vs. private space (like a blog or tweets) before studying them and allowing that answer to guide the ethics of the study. Despite researchers possibly classifying Facebook as a public space, I think most people would say it is private. At least there is the illusion of privacy because you can change the privacy settings.

      I think it’s interesting that there was an uproar about the emotions study done on Facebook but people did not seem outraged when Facebook encouraged people to go vote. There is a perception that some intrusions are okay – like being reminded to do your civic duty – but others are bad, even though the intrusions are for research purposes. It makes you wonder where the line is drawn.