essay on ethics in social media and technology

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Social Networking and Ethics

In the 21 st century, new media technologies for social networking such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube began to transform the social, political and informational practices of individuals and institutions across the globe, inviting philosophical responses from the community of applied ethicists and philosophers of technology. While scholarly responses to social media continue to be challenged by the rapidly evolving nature of these technologies, the urgent need for attention to the social networking phenomenon is underscored by the fact that it has profoundly reshaped how many human beings initiate and/or maintain virtually every type of ethically significant social bond or role: friend-to-friend, parent-to-child, co-worker-to co-worker, employer-to-employee, teacher-to-student, neighbor-to-neighbor, seller-to-buyer, doctor-to-patient, and voter-to-voter, to offer just a partial list. Nor are the ethical implications of these technologies strictly interpersonal, as it has become evident that social networking services (hereafter referred to as SNS) and other new digital media have profound implications for democracy, public institutions and the rule of law. The complex web of interactions between SNS developers and users, and their online and offline communities, corporations and governments—along with the diverse and sometimes conflicting motives and interests of these various stakeholders—will continue to require rigorous ethical analysis for decades to come.

Section 1 of the entry outlines the history and working definition of social networking services. Section 2 identifies the early philosophical foundations of reflection on the ethics of online social networks, leading up to the emergence of Web 2.0 standards (supporting user interactions) and full-fledged SNS. Section 3 reviews the primary ethical topic areas around which philosophical reflections on SNS have, to date, converged: privacy; identity and community; friendship, virtue and the good life; democracy, free speech, misinformation/disinformation and the public sphere; and cybercrime. Finally, Section 4 reviews some of the metaethical issues potentially impacted by the emergence of SNS.

1.1 Online Social Networks and the Emergence of ‘Web 2.0’

1.2 early scholarly engagement with social networking services, 2.1 borgmann’s critique of social hyperreality, 2.2 hubert dreyfus on internet sociality: anonymity versus commitment, 2.3.1 borgmann, dreyfus and the ‘cancel culture’ debates.

• 2.3.2 The Civic Harms of Social Hyperreality

3.1 Social Networking Services and Privacy

3.2 the ethics of identity and community on social networking services, 3.3 friendship, virtue and the good life on social networking services, 3.4 democracy, freedom and social networking services in the public sphere, 3.5 social networking services and cybercrime, 4. social networking services and metaethical issues, other internet resources, related entries, 1. history and definitions of social networking services.

‘Social networking’ is an inherently ambiguous term requiring some clarification. Human beings have been socially ‘networked’ in one manner or another for as long as we have been on the planet, and we have historically availed ourselves of many successive techniques and instruments for facilitating and maintaining such networks. These include structured social affiliations and institutions such as private and public clubs, lodges and churches as well as communications technologies such as postal and courier systems, telegraphs and telephones. When philosophers speak today, however, of ‘Social Networking and Ethics’, they usually refer more narrowly to the ethical impact of an evolving and loosely defined group of information technologies, most based on or inspired by the ‘Web 2.0’ software standards that emerged in the first decade of the 21 st century. While the most widely used social networking services are free, they operate on large platforms that offer a range of related products and services that underpin their business models, from targeted advertising and data licensing to cloud storage and enterprise software. Ethical impacts of social networking services are loosely clustered into three categories – direct impacts of social networking activity itself, indirect impacts associated with the underlying business models that are enabled by such activity, and structural implications of SNS as novel sociopolitical and cultural forces.

Prior to the emergence of Web 2.0 standards, the computer had already served for decades as a medium for various forms of social networking, beginning in the 1970s with social uses of the U.S. military’s ARPANET and evolving to facilitate thousands of Internet newsgroups and electronic mailing lists, BBS (bulletin board systems), MUDs (multi-user dungeons) and chat rooms dedicated to an eclectic range of topics and social identities (Barnes 2001; Turkle 1995). These early computer social networks were systems that grew up organically, typically as ways of exploiting commercial, academic or other institutional software for more broadly social purposes. In contrast, Web 2.0 technologies evolved specifically to facilitate user-generated, collaborative and shared Internet content, and while the initial aims of Web 2.0 software developers were still largely commercial and institutional, the new standards were designed explicitly to harness the already-evident potential of the Internet for social networking. Most notably, Web 2.0 social interfaces redefined the social topography of the Internet by enabling users to build increasingly seamless connections between their online social presence and their existing social networks offline—a trend that shifted the Internet away from its earlier function as a haven for largely anonymous or pseudonymous identities forming sui generis social networks (Ess 2011).

Starting in the first decade of the 21st century, among the first websites to employ the new standards explicitly for general social networking purposes were Orkut, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo, Habbo and Facebook. Subsequent trends in online social networking include the rise of sites dedicated to media and news sharing (YouTube, Reddit, Flickr, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, TikTok), microblogging (Tumblr, Twitter, Weibo), location-based networking (Foursquare, Loopt, Yelp, YikYak), messaging and VoIP (WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat), social gaming (Steam, Twitch) and interest-sharing (Pinterest).

Study of the ethical implications of SNS was initially seen as a subpart of Computer and Information Ethics (Bynum 2018). While Computer and Information Ethics certainly accommodates an interdisciplinary approach, its direction and problems were initially largely defined by philosophically-trained scholars such as James Moor (1985) and Deborah G. Johnson (1985). Yet this has not been the early pattern for the ethics of social networking. Partly due to the coincidence of the social networking phenomenon with the emerging interdisciplinary social science field of ‘Internet Studies’ (Consalvo and Ess, 2011), the ethical implications of social networking technologies were initially targeted for inquiry by a loose coalition of sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, law and media scholars and political scientists (see, for example, Giles 2006; Boyd 2007; Ellison et al. 2007; Ito 2009). Consequently, philosophers who have turned their attention to social networking and ethics have had to decide whether to pursue their inquiries independently, drawing primarily from traditional philosophical resources in applied computer ethics and the philosophy of technology, or to develop their views in consultation with the growing body of empirical data and conclusions already being generated by other disciplines. While this entry will primarily confine itself to reviewing existing philosophical research on social networking ethics, links between those researches and studies in other disciplinary contexts remain vital.

Indeed, recent academic and popular debates about the harms and benefits of large social media platforms have been driven far more visibly by scholars in sociology (Benjamin 2019), information studies (Roberts 2019), psychology (Zuboff 2019) and other social sciences than by philosophers, who remain comparatively disengaged. In turn, rather than engage with philosophical ethics, social science researchers in this field typically anchor normative dimensions of their analyses in broader political frameworks of justice and human rights, or psychological accounts of wellbeing. This has led to a growing debate about whether philosophical ‘ethics’ remains the right lens through which to subject social networking services or other emerging technologies to normative critique (Green 2021, Other Internet Resources). This debate is driven by several concerns. First is the growing professionalization of applied ethics (Stark and Hoffmann 2019) and its perceived detachment from social critique. A second concern is the trend of insincere corporate appropriation of the language of ethics for marketing, crisis management and public relations purposes, known as ‘ethicswashing’ (Bietti 2020). Finally, there is the question of whether philosophical theories of ethics, which have traditionally focused on individual actions, are sufficiently responsive to the structural conditions of social injustice that drive many SNS-associated harms.

2. Early Philosophical Concerns about Online Social Networks

Among the first philosophers to take an interest in the ethical significance of social uses of the Internet were phenomenological philosophers of technology Albert Borgmann and Hubert Dreyfus. These thinkers were heavily influenced by Heidegger’s (1954 [1977]) view of technology as a monolithic force with a distinctive vector of influence, one that tends to constrain or impoverish the human experience of reality in specific ways. While Borgmann and Dreyfus were primarily responding to the immediate precursors of Web 2.0 social networks (e.g., chat rooms, newsgroups, online gaming and email), their conclusions, which aim at online sociality broadly construed, are directly relevant to SNS.

Borgmann’s early critique (1984) of modern technology addressed what he called the device paradigm , a technologically-driven tendency to conform our interactions with the world to a model of easy consumption. By 1992’s Crossing the Postmodern Divide , however, Borgmann had become more narrowly focused on the ethical and social impact of information technologies, employing the concept of hyperreality to critique (among other aspects of information technology) the way in which online social networks may subvert or displace organic social realities by allowing people to “offer one another stylized versions of themselves for amorous or convivial entertainment” (1992, 92) rather than allowing the fullness and complexity of their real identities to be engaged. While Borgmann admits that in itself a social hyperreality seems “morally inert” (1992, 94), he insists that the ethical danger of hyperrealities lies in their tendency to leave us “resentful and defeated” when we are forced to return from their “insubstantial and disconnected glamour” to the organic reality which “with all its poverty inescapably asserts its claims on us” by providing “the tasks and blessings that call forth patience and vigor in people.” (1992, 96)

There might be an inherent ambiguity in Borgmann’s analysis, however. On the one hand he tells us that it is the competition with our organic and embodied social presence that makes online social environments designed for convenience, pleasure and ease ethically problematic, since the latter will inevitably be judged more satisfying than the ‘real’ social environment. But he goes on to claim that online social environments are themselves ethically deficient:

Those who become present via a communication link have a diminished presence, since we can always make them vanish if their presence becomes burdensome. Moreover, we can protect ourselves from unwelcome persons altogether by using screening devices….The extended network of hyperintelligence also disconnects us from the people we would meet incidentally at concerts, plays and political gatherings. As it is, we are always and already linked to the music and entertainment we desire and to sources of political information. This immobile attachment to the web of communication works a twofold deprivation in our lives. It cuts us off from the pleasure of seeing people in the round and from the instruction of being seen and judged by them. It robs us of the social resonance that invigorates our concentration and acumen when we listen to music or watch a play.…Again it seems that by having our hyperintelligent eyes and ears everywhere, we can attain world citizenship of unequaled scope and subtlety. But the world that is hyperintelligently spread out before us has lost its force and resistance. (1992, 105–6)

Critics of Borgmann saw him as adopting Heidegger’s (1954 [1977]) substantivist, monolithic model of technology as a singular, deterministic force in human affairs (Feenberg 1999; Verbeek 2005). This model, known as technological determinism , represents technology as an independent driver of social and cultural change, shaping human institutions, practices and values in a manner largely beyond our control. Whether or not this is ultimately Borgmann’s view (or Heidegger’s), his critics saw it in remarks of the following sort: “[Social hyperreality] has already begun to transform the social fabric…At length it will lead to a disconnected, disembodied, and disoriented sort of life…It is obviously growing and thickening, suffocating reality and rendering humanity less mindful and intelligent.” (Borgmann 1992, 108–9)

Critics asserted that Borgmann’s analysis suffered from his lack of attention to the substantive differences between particular social networking technologies and their varied contexts of use, as well as the different motivations and patterns of activity displayed by individual users in those contexts. For example, Borgmann neglected the fact that physical reality does not always enable or facilitate connection, nor does it do so equally for all persons. For example, those who live in remote rural areas, neurodivergent persons, disabled persons and members of socially marginalized groups are often not well served by the affordances of physical social spaces. As a consequence, Andrew Feenberg (1999) claims that Borgmann overlooked how online social networks can supply sites of democratic resistance for those who are physically or politically disempowered by many ‘real-world’ networks.

Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus (2001) shared Borgmann’s early critical suspicion of the ethical possibilities of the Internet; like Borgmann, Dreyfus’s reflections on the ethical dimension of online sociality conveyed a view of such networks as an impoverished substitute for the real thing. Like Borgmann, Dreyfus’s suspicion was informed by his phenomenological roots, which led him to focus his critical attention on the Internet’s suspension of fully embodied presence. Yet rather than draw upon Heidegger’s metaphysical framework, Dreyfus (2004) reached back to Kierkegaard in forming his criticisms of life online. Dreyfus asserts that what online engagements intrinsically lack is exposure to risk , and without risk, Dreyfus tells us, there can be no true meaning or commitment found in the electronic domain. Instead, we are drawn to online social environments precisely because they allow us to play with notions of identity, commitment and meaning, without risking the irrevocable consequences that ground real identities and relationships. As Dreyfus put it:

…the Net frees people to develop new and exciting selves. The person living in the aesthetic sphere of existence would surely agree, but according to Kierkegaard, “As a result of knowing and being everything possible, one is in contradiction with oneself” (Present Age, 68). When he is speaking from the point of view of the next higher sphere of existence, Kierkegaard tells us that the self requires not “variableness and brilliancy,” but “firmness, balance, and steadiness” (Dreyfus 2004, 75)

While Dreyfus acknowledges that unconditional commitment and acceptance of risk are not excluded in principle by online sociality, he insists that “anyone using the Net who was led to risk his or her real identity in the real world would have to act against the grain of what attracted him or her to the Net in the first place” (2004, 78).

2.3 Contemporary Reassessment of Early Phenomenological Critiques of SNS

While Borgmann and Dreyfus’s views continue to inform the philosophical conversation about social networking and ethics, both of these early philosophical engagements with the phenomenon manifest certain predictive failures (as is perhaps unavoidable when reflecting on new and rapidly evolving technological systems). Dreyfus did not foresee the way in which popular SNS such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter would shift away from the earlier online norms of anonymity and identity play, instead giving real-world identities an online presence which in some ways is less ephemeral than bodily presence (as those who have struggled to erase online traces of past tweets or to delete Facebook profiles of deceased loved ones can attest).

Likewise, Borgmann’s critiques of “immobile attachment” to the online datastream did not anticipate the rise of mobile social networking applications which not only encourage us to physically seek out and join our friends at those same concerts, plays and political events that he envisioned us passively digesting from an electronic feed, but also enable spontaneous physical gatherings in ways never before possible. That said, such short-term predictive failures may not, in the long view, turn out to be fatal to their legacies. After all, some of the most enthusiastic champions of the Internet’s liberating social possibilities to be challenged by Dreyfus (2004, 75), such as Sherry Turkle, have since articulated far more pessimistic views of the trajectory of new social technologies. Turkle’s concerns about social media in particular (2011, 2015), namely that they foster a peculiar alienation in connectedness that leaves us feeling “alone together,” resonate well with Borgmann’s earlier warnings about electronic networks.

The SNS phenomenon continues to be ambiguous with respect to confirming Borgmann and Dreyfus’ early predictions. One of their most unfounded worries was that online social media would lead to a culture in which personal beliefs and actions are stripped of enduring consequence, cut adrift from real-world identities as persons accountable to one another. Today, no regular user of Twitter or Reddit is cut off from “the instruction of being seen and judged” (Borgmann 1992). And contra Dreyfus, it is primarily through the power of social media that people’s identities in the real world are now exposed to greater risk than before – from doxing to loss of employment to being physically endangered by ‘swatting.’

If anything, contemporary debates about social media’s alleged propagation of a stifling ‘cancel culture,’ which bend back upon the philosophical community itself (Weinberg 2020, Other Internet Resources), reflect growing anxieties among many that social networking environments primarily lack affordances for forgiveness and mercy, not judgment and personal accountability. Yet others see the emergent phenomenon of online collective judgment as performing a vital function of moral and political levelling, one in which social media enable the natural ethical consequences of an agent’s speech and acts to at last be imposed upon the powerful, not merely the vulnerable and marginalized.

2.3.2. The Civic Harms of Social Hyperreality

One aspect of Borgmann’s (1992) account has recently rebounded in plausibility; namely, his prediction of a dire decline in civic virtues among those fully submerged in the distorted political reality created by the disembodied and disorienting ‘hyperintelligence’ of online social media. In the wake of the 2016 UK and US voter manipulation by foreign armies of social media bots, sock puppets, and astroturf accounts, the world has seen a rapid global expansion and acceleration of political disinformation and conspiracy theories through online social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp.

The profound harms of the ‘weaponization’ of social media disinformation go well beyond voter manipulation. In 2020, disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic greatly impeded public health authorities by clouding the public’s perception of the severity and transmissibility of the virus as well as the utility of prophylactics such as mask-wearing. Meanwhile, the increasing global influence of ever-mutating conspiracy theories borne on social media platforms by the anonymous group QAnon suggests that Borgmann’s warning of the dangers of our rising culture of ‘hyperreality,’ long derided as technophobic ‘moral panic,’ was dismissed far too hastily. While the notorious ‘Pizzagate’ episode of 2016 (Miller 2021) was the first visible link between QAnon conspiracies and real-world violence, the alarming uptake in 2020 of QAnon conspiracies by violent right-wing militias in the United States led Facebook and Twitter to abandon their prior tolerance of the movement and ban or limit access to hundreds of thousands of QAnon-associated accounts.

Such moves came too late to stabilize the epistemic and political rift in a shared reality. By late 2020, QAnon had boosted a widely successful effort by supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump to create a (manifestly false) counter-narrative around the 2020 election purporting that he had actually won, leading to a failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Borgmann’s warnings on ‘hyperreality’ seem less like moral panic and more like prescience when one considers the existence of a wide swath of American voters who remain convinced that Donald Trump remains legitimately in office, directing actions against his enemies. Such counter-narratives are not merely ‘underground’ belief systems; they compete directly with reality itself. On June 17, 2021, the mainstream national newspaper USA Today found it necessary to publish a piece titled “Fact Check: Hilary Clinton was not hanged at Guantanamo Bay” (Wagner 2021) in response to a video being widely shared on the social media platforms TikTok and Instagram, which describes in fine detail the (very much alive) Clinton’s last meal.

Borgmann’s long-neglected work on social hyperreality thus merits reevaluation in light of the growing fractures and incoherencies that now splinter and twist our digitally mediated experience of what remains, underneath it all, a common world. The COVID-19 pandemic and increasingly catastrophic impacts of climate change testify to humanity’s vital need to remain anchored in and intelligently responsive to a shared physical reality.

Yet both the spread of social media-driven disinformation and the rise of online moral policing reveal an unresolved philosophical tension that Borgmann’s own work did not explicitly confront. This is the Concept of Toleration and its Paradoxes , which continue to bedevil modern political thought. Social networking services have transformed this festering concern of political philosophy into something verging on an existential crisis. When malice and madness can be amplified on a global scale at lightspeed, in a manner affordable and accessible to anyone with a smartphone or wifi connection, what is too injurious and too irremediable, to be said, or shared (Marin 2021)?

Social media continue to drive a range of new philosophical investigations in the domains of social epistemology and ethics, including ‘vice epistemology’ (Kidd, Battaly, Cassam 2020). Such investigations raise urgent questions about the relationship between online disinformation/misinformation, individual moral and epistemic responsibility, and the responsibility of social media platforms themselves. On this point, Regina Rini (2017) has argued that the problem of online disinformation/misinformation is not properly conceived in terms of individual epistemic vice, but rather must be seen as a “tragedy of the epistemic commons” that will require institutional and structural solutions.

3. Contemporary Ethical Concerns about Social Networking Services

While early SNS scholarship in the social and natural sciences tended to focus on SNS impact on users’ psychosocial markers of happiness, well-being, psychosocial adjustment, social capital, or feelings of life satisfaction, philosophical concerns about social networking and ethics have generally centered on topics less amenable to empirical measurement (e.g., privacy, identity, friendship, the good life and democratic freedom). More so than ‘social capital’ or feelings of ‘life satisfaction,’ these topics are closely tied to traditional concerns of ethical theory (e.g., virtues, rights, duties, motivations and consequences). These topics are also tightly linked to the novel features and distinctive functionalities of SNS, more so than some other issues of interest in computer and information ethics that relate to more general Internet functionalities (for example, issues of copyright and intellectual property).

Despite the methodological challenges of applying philosophical theory to rapidly shifting empirical patterns of SNS influence, philosophical explorations of the ethics of SNS have continued in recent years to move away from Borgmann and Dreyfus’ transcendental-existential concerns about the Internet, to the empirically-driven space of applied technology ethics. Research in this space explores three interlinked and loosely overlapping kinds of ethical phenomena:

• direct ethical impacts of social networking activity itself (just or unjust, harmful or beneficial) on participants as well as third parties and institutions;
• indirect ethical impacts on society of social networking activity, caused by the aggregate behavior of users, platform providers and/or their agents in complex interactions between these and other social actors and forces;
• structural impacts of SNS on the ethical shape of society, especially those driven by the dominant surveillant and extractivist value orientations that sustain social networking platforms and culture.

Most research in the field, however, remains topic- and domain-driven—exploring a given potential harm or domain-specific ethical dilemma that arises from direct, indirect, or structural effects of SNS, or more often, in combination. Sections 3.1–3.5 outline the most widely discussed of contemporary SNS’ ethical challenges.

Fundamental practices of concern for direct ethical impacts on privacy include: the transfer of users’ data to third parties for intrusive purposes, especially marketing, data mining, and surveillance; the use of SNS data to train facial-recognition systems or other algorithmic tools that identify, track and profile people without their free consent; the ability of third-party applications to collect and publish user data without their permission or awareness; the dominant reliance by SNS on opaque or inadequate privacy settings; the use of ‘cookies’ to track online user activities after they have left a SNS; the abuse of social networking tools or data for stalking or harassment; widespread scraping of social media data by academic researchers for a variety of unconsented purposes; undisclosed sharing of user information or patterns of activity with government entities; and, last but not least, the tendency of SNS to foster imprudent, ill-informed or unethical information sharing practices by users, either with respect to their own personal data or data related to other persons and entities. Facebook has been a particular lightning-rod for criticism of its privacy practices (Spinello 2011, Vaidhyanathan 2018), but it is just the most visible member of a far broader and more complex network of SNS actors with access to unprecedented quantities of sensitive personal data.

Indirectly, the incentives of social media environments create particular problems with respect to privacy norms. For example, since it is the ability to access information freely shared by others that makes SNS uniquely attractive and useful, and since platforms are generally designed to reward disclosure, it turns out that contrary to traditional views of information privacy, giving users greater control over their information-sharing practices can actually lead to decreased privacy for themselves and others in their network. Indeed, advertisers, insurance companies and employers are increasingly less interested in knowing the private facts of individual users’ lives, and more interested in using their data to train algorithms that can predict the behavior of people very much like that user. Thus the real privacy risk of our social media practices is often not to ourselves but to other people; if a person is comfortable with the personal risk of their data sharing habits, it does not follow that these habits are ethically benign. Moreover, users are still caught in the tension between their personal motivations for using SNS and the profit-driven motivations of the corporations that possess their data (Baym 2011, Vaidhyanathan 2018). Jared Lanier frames the point cynically when he states that: “The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable” (Lanier 2010).

Scholars also note the way in which SNS architectures are often structurally insensitive to the granularity of human sociality (Hull, Lipford & Latulipe 2011). That is, such architectures tend to treat human relations as if they are all of a kind, ignoring the profound differences among types of social relation (familial, professional, collegial, commercial, civic, etc.). As a consequence, the privacy controls of such architectures often flatten the variability of privacy norms within different but overlapping social spheres. Among philosophical accounts of privacy, Nissenbaum’s (2010) view of contextual integrity has seemed to many to be particularly well suited to explaining the diversity and complexity of privacy expectations generated by new social media (see for example Grodzinsky and Tavani 2010; Capurro 2011). Contextual integrity demands that our information practices respect context-sensitive privacy norms, where ‘context’ refers not to the overly coarse distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public,’ but to a far richer array of social settings characterized by distinctive roles, norms and values. For example, the same piece of information made ‘public’ in the context of a status update to family and friends on Facebook may nevertheless be considered by the same discloser to be ‘private’ in other contexts; that is, she may not expect that same information to be provided to strangers Googling her name, or to bank employees examining her credit history.

On the design side, such complexity means that attempts to produce more ‘user-friendly’ privacy controls face an uphill challenge—they must balance the need for simplicity and ease of use with the need to better represent the rich and complex structures of our social universes. A key design question, then, is how SNS privacy interfaces can be made more accessible and more socially intuitive for users.

Hull et al. (2011) also take note of the apparent plasticity of user attitudes about privacy in SNS contexts, as evidenced by the pattern of widespread outrage over changed or newly disclosed privacy practices of SNS providers being followed by a period of accommodation to and acceptance of the new practices (Boyd and Hargittai 2010). In their 2018 book Re-Engineering Humanity , Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger argue that SNS contribute to a slippery slope of “techno-social engineering creep” that produces a gradual normalization of increasingly pervasive and intrusive digital surveillance. A related concern is the “privacy paradox,” in which users’ voluntary sharing of data online belies their own stated values concerning privacy. However, recent data from Apple’s introduction in iOS 14.5 of opt-in for ad tracking, which the vast majority of iOS users have declined to allow, suggests that most people continue to value and act to protect their privacy, when given a straightforward choice that does not inhibit their access to services (Axon 2021). Working from the late writings of Foucault, Hull (2015) has explored the way in which the ‘self-management’ model of online privacy protection embodied in standard ‘notice and consent’ practices only reinforces a narrow neoliberal conception of privacy, and of ourselves, as commodities for sale and exchange. The debate continues about whether privacy violations can be usefully addressed by users making wiser privacy-preserving choices (Véliz 2021), or whether the responsibilization of individuals only obscures the urgent need for radical structural reforms of SNS business models (Vaidhyanathan 2018).

In an early study of online communities, Bakardjieva and Feenberg (2000) suggested that the rise of communities predicated on the open exchange of information may in fact require us to relocate our focus in information ethics from privacy concerns to concerns about alienation ; that is, the exploitation of information for purposes not intended by the relevant community. Such considerations give rise to the possibility of users deploying “guerrilla tactics” of misinformation, for example, by providing SNS hosts with false names, addresses, birthdates, hometowns or employment information. Such tactics would aim to subvert the emergence of a new “digital totalitarianism” that uses the power of information rather than physical force as a political control (Capurro 2011).

Finally, privacy issues with SNS highlight a broader philosophical and structural problem involving the intercultural dimensions of information ethics and the challenges for ethical pluralism in global digital spaces (Ess 2021). Pak Hang Wong (2013) has argued for the need for privacy norms to be contextualized in ways that do not impose a culturally hegemonic Western understanding of why privacy matters; for example, in the Confucian context, it is familial privacy rather than individual privacy that is of greatest moral concern. Rafael Capurro (2005) has also noted the way in which narrowly Western conceptions of privacy occlude other legitimate ethical concerns regarding new media practices. For example, he notes that in addition to Western worries about protecting the private domain from public exposure, we must also take care to protect the public sphere from the excessive intrusion of the private. Though he illustrates the point with a comment about intrusive uses of cell phones in public spaces (2005, 47), the rise of mobile social networking has amplified this concern by several factors. When one must compete with Facebook or Twitter for the attention of not only one’s dinner companions and family members, but also one’s fellow drivers, pedestrians, students, moviegoers, patients and audience members, the integrity of the public sphere comes to look as fragile as that of the private.

Social networking technologies open up a new type of ethical space in which personal identities and communities, both ‘real’ and virtual, are constructed, presented, negotiated, managed and performed. Accordingly, philosophers have analyzed SNS both in terms of their uses as Foucaultian “technologies of the self” (Bakardjieva and Gaden 2012) that facilitate the construction and performance of personal identity, and in terms of the distinctive kinds of communal norms and moral practices generated by SNS (Parsell 2008).

The ethical and metaphysical issues generated by the formation of virtual identities and communities have attracted much philosophical interest (see Introna 2011 and Rodogno 2012). Yet as noted by Patrick Stokes (2012), unlike earlier forms of online community in which anonymity and the construction of alter-egos were typical, SNS such as Facebook increasingly anchor member identities and connections to real, embodied selves and offline ‘real-world’ networks. Yet SNS still enable users to directly manage their self-presentation and their social networks in ways that offline social spaces at home, school or work often do not permit. The result, then, is an identity grounded in the person’s material reality and embodiment but more explicitly “reflective and aspirational” (Stokes 2012, 365) in its presentation, a phenomenon encapsulated in social media platforms such as Instagram. This raises a number of ethical questions: first, from what source of normative guidance or value does the aspirational content of an SNS user’s identity primarily derive? Do identity performances on SNS generally represent the same aspirations and reflect the same value profiles as users’ offline identity performances? Do they display any notable differences from the aspirational identities of non-SNS users? Are the values and aspirations made explicit in SNS contexts more or less heteronomous in origin than those expressed in non-SNS contexts? Do the more explicitly aspirational identity performances on SNS encourage users to take steps to actually embody those aspirations offline, or do they tend to weaken the motivation to do so?

A further SNS phenomenon of relevance here is the persistence and communal memorialization of Facebook profiles after the user’s death; not only does this reinvigorate a number of classical ethical questions about our ethical duties to honor and remember the dead, it also renews questions about whether our moral identities can persist after our embodied identities expire, and whether the dead have ongoing interests in their social presence or reputation (Stokes 2012).

Mitch Parsell (2008) raised early concerns about the unique temptations of ‘narrowcast’ social networking communities that are “composed of those just like yourself, whatever your opinion, personality or prejudices.” (41) Such worries about ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ have only become more acute as political polarization continues to dominate online culture. Among the structural affordances of SNS is a tendency to constrict our identities to a closed set of communal norms that perpetuate increased polarization, prejudice and insularity. Parsells admitted that in theory the many-to-many or one-to-many relations enabled by SNS allow for exposure to a greater variety of opinions and attitudes, but in practice they often have the opposite effect. Building from de Laat (2006), who suggests that members of virtual communities embrace a distinctly hyperactive style of communication to compensate for diminished informational cues, Parsell claimed that in the absence of the full range of personal identifiers evident through face-to-face contact, SNS may also indirectly promote the deindividuation of personal identity by exaggerating and reinforcing the significance of singular shared traits (liberal, conservative, gay, Catholic, etc.) that lead us to see ourselves and our SNS contacts more as representatives of a group than as unique persons (2008, 46).

Parsell also noted the existence of inherently pernicious identities and communities that may be enabled or enhanced by SNS tools—he cites the example of apotemnophiliacs, or would-be amputees, who use such resources to create mutually supportive networks in which their self-destructive desires receive validation (2008, 48). Related concerns have been raised about “Pro-ANA” sites that provide mutually supportive networks for anorexics seeking information and tools to allow them to perpetuate disordered and self-harming identities (Giles 2006; Manders-Huits 2010).

Restraint of such affordances necessarily comes at some cost to user autonomy—a value that in other circumstances is critical to respecting the ethical demands of identity, as noted by Noemi Manders-Huits (2010). Manders-Huits explores the tension between the way in which SNS treat users as profiled and forensically reidentifiable “objects of (algorithmic) computation” (2010, 52) while at the same time offering those users an attractive space for ongoing identity construction. She argues that SNS developers have a duty to protect and promote the interests of their users in autonomously constructing and managing their own moral and practical identities. This autonomy exists in some tension with widespread but still crude practices of automated SNS content moderation that seek on the one hand, to preserve a ’safe’ space for expression, yet may disproportionately suppress marginalized identities (Gillespie 2020).

The ethical concern about SNS constraints on user autonomy is also voiced by Bakardjieva and Gaden (2012) who note that whether they wish their identities to be formed and used in this manner or not, the online selves of SNS users are constituted by the categories established by SNS developers, and ranked and evaluated according to the currency which primarily drives the narrow “moral economy” of SNS communities: popularity (2012, 410). They note, however, that users are not rendered wholly powerless by this schema; users retain, and many exercise, “the liberty to make informed choices and negotiate the terms of their self-constitution and interaction with others,” (2012, 411) whether by employing means to resist the “commercial imperatives” of SNS sites (ibid.) or by deliberately restricting the scope and extent of their personal SNS practices.

SNS can also enable authenticity in important ways. While a ‘Timeline’ feature that displays my entire online personal history for all my friends to see can prompt me to ‘edit’ my past, it can also prompt me to face up to and assimilate into my self-conception thoughts and actions that might otherwise be conveniently forgotten. The messy collision of my family, friends and coworkers on Facebook can be managed with various tools offered by the site, allowing me to direct posts only to specific sub-networks that I define. But the far simpler and less time-consuming strategy is to come to terms with the collision—allowing each network member to get a glimpse of who I am to others, while at the same time asking myself whether these expanded presentations project a person that is more multidimensional and interesting, or one that is manifestly insincere. As Tamara Wandel and Anthony Beavers put it:

I am thus no longer radically free to engage in creating a completely fictive self, I must become someone real, not who I really am pregiven from the start, but who I am allowed to be and what I am able to negotiate in the careful dynamic between who I want to be and who my friends from these multiple constituencies perceive me, allow me, and need me to be. (2011, 93)

Even so, Dean Cocking (2008) has argued that many online social environments, by amplifying active aspects of self-presentation under our direct control, compromise the important function of passive modes of embodied self-presentation beyond our conscious control, such as body language, facial expression, and spontaneous displays of emotion (130). He regards these as important indicators of character that play a critical role in how others see us, and by extension, how we come to understand ourselves through others’ perceptions and reactions. If Cocking’s view is correct, then SNS that privilege text-based and asynchronous communications may hamper our ability to cultivate and express authentic identities. The subsequent rise in popularity of video and livestream SNS services such as YouTube, TikTok, Stream and Twitch might therefore be seen as enabling of greater authenticity in self-presentation. Yet in reality, the algorithmic and profit incentives of these platforms have been seen to reward distorted patterns of expression: compulsive, ‘always performing’ norms that are reported to contribute to burnout and breakdown by content creators (Parkin 2018).

Ethical preoccupations with the impact of SNS on our authentic self-constitution and representation may be assuming a false dichotomy between online and offline identities; the informational theory of personal identity offered by Luciano Floridi (2011) problematizes this distinction. Soraj Hongladarom (2011) employs such an informational metaphysic to deny that any clear boundary can be drawn between our offline selves and our selves as cultivated through SNS. Instead, our personal identities online and off are taken as externally constituted by our informational relations to other selves, events and objects.

Likewise, Charles Ess makes a link between relational models of the self found in Aristotle, Confucius and many contemporary feminist thinkers and emerging notions of the networked individual as a “smeared-out self” (2010, 111) constituted by a shifting web of embodied and informational relations. Ess points out that by undermining the atomic and dualistic model of the self upon which Western liberal democracies are founded, this new conception of the self forces us to reassess traditional philosophical approaches to ethical concerns about privacy and autonomy—and may even promote the emergence of a much-needed “global information ethics” (2010, 112). Yet he worries that our ‘smeared-out selves’ may lose coherence as the relations that constitute us are increasingly multiplied and scattered among a vast and expanding web of networked channels. Can such selves retain the capacities of critical rationality required for the exercise of liberal democracy, or will our networked selves increasingly be characterized by political and intellectual passivity, hampered in self-governance by “shorter attention spans and less capacity to engage with critical argument” (2010, 114)? Ess suggests that we hope for, and work to enable the emergence of, ‘hybrid selves’ that cultivate the individual moral and practical virtues needed to flourish within our networked and embodied relations (2010, 116).

SNS can facilitate many types of relational connections: LinkedIn encourages social relations organized around our professional lives, Twitter is useful for creating lines of communication between ordinary individuals and figures of public interest, MySpace was for a time a popular way for musicians to promote themselves and communicate with their fans, and Facebook, which began as a way to link university cohorts and now connects people across the globe, also hosts business profiles aimed at establishing links to existing and future customers. Yet the overarching relational concept in the SNS universe has been, and continues to be, the ‘friend,’ as underscored by the now-common use of this term as a verb to refer to acts of instigating or confirming relationships on SNS.

This appropriation and expansion of the concept ‘friend’ by SNS has provoked a great deal of scholarly interest from philosophers and social scientists, more so than any other ethical concern except perhaps privacy. Early concerns about SNS friendship centered on the expectation that such sites would be used primarily to build ‘virtual’ friendships between physically separated individuals lacking a ‘real-world’ or ‘face-to-face’ connection. This perception was an understandable extrapolation from earlier patterns of Internet sociality, patterns that had prompted philosophical worries about whether online friendships could ever be ‘as good as the real thing’ or were doomed to be pale substitutes for embodied ‘face to face’ connections (Cocking and Matthews 2000). This view was robustly opposed by Adam Briggle (2008), who claimed that online friendships might enjoy certain unique advantages. For example, Briggle asserted that friendships formed online might be more candid than offline ones, thanks to the sense of security provided by physical distance (2008, 75). He also noted the way in which asynchronous written communications can promote more deliberate and thoughtful exchanges (2008, 77).

These sorts of questions about how online friendships measure up to offline ones, along with questions about whether or to what extent online friendships encroach upon users’ commitments to embodied, ‘real-world’ relations with friends, family members and communities, defined the ethical problem-space of online friendship as SNS began to emerge. But it did not take long for empirical studies of actual SNS usage trends to force a profound rethinking of this problem-space. Within five years of Facebook’s launch, it was evident that a significant majority of SNS users were relying on these sites primarily to maintain and enhance relationships with those with whom they also had a strong offline connection—including close family members, high-school and college friends and co-workers (Ellison, Steinfeld and Lampe 2007; Ito et al. 2009; Smith 2011). Nor are SNS used to facilitate purely online exchanges—many SNS users today rely on the sites’ functionalities to organize everything from cocktail parties to movie nights, outings to athletic or cultural events, family reunions and community meetings. Mobile SNS applications amplify this type of functionality further, by enabling friends to locate one another in their community in real-time, enabling spontaneous meetings at restaurants, bars and shops that would otherwise happen only by coincidence.

Yet lingering ethical concerns remain about the way in which SNS can distract users from the needs of those in their immediate physical surroundings (consider the widely lamented trend of users obsessively checking their social media feeds during family dinners, business meetings, romantic dates and symphony performances). Such phenomena, which scholars like Sherry Turkle (2011, 2015) continue to worry are indicative of a growing cultural tolerance for being ‘alone together,’ bring a new complexity to earlier philosophical concerns about the emergence of a zero-sum game between offline relationships and their virtual SNS competitors. They have also prompted a shift of ethical focus away from the question of whether online relationships are “real” friendships (Cocking and Matthews 2000), to how well the real friendships we bring to SNS are being served there (Vallor 2012). The debate over the value and quality of online friendships continues (Sharp 2012; Froding and Peterson 2012; Elder 2014; Turp 2020; Kristjánsson 2021); in large part because the typical pattern of those friendships, like most social networking phenomena, continues to evolve.

Such concerns intersect with broader philosophical questions about whether and how the classical ethical ideal of ‘the good life’ can be engaged in the 21 st century. Pak-Hang Wong claims that this question requires us to broaden the standard approach to information ethics from a narrow focus on the “right/the just” (2010, 29) that defines ethical action negatively (e.g., in terms of violations of privacy, copyright, etc.) to a framework that conceives of a positive ethical trajectory for our technological choices; for example, the ethical opportunity to foster compassionate and caring communities, or to create an environmentally sustainable economic order. Edward Spence (2011) further suggests that to adequately address the significance of SNS and related information and communication technologies for the good life, we must also expand the scope of philosophical inquiry beyond its present concern with narrowly interpersonal ethics to the more universal ethical question of prudential wisdom . Do SNS and related technologies help us to cultivate the broader intellectual virtue of knowing what it is to live well, and how to best pursue it? Or do they tend to impede its development?

This concern about prudential wisdom and the good life is part of a growing philosophical interest in using the resources of classical and contemporary virtue ethics to evaluate the impact of SNS and related technologies (Vallor 2016, 2010; Wong 2012; Ess 2008). This program of research promotes inquiry into the impact of SNS not merely on the cultivation of prudential virtue, but on the development of a host of other moral and communicative virtues, such as honesty, patience, justice, loyalty, benevolence and empathy.

As is the case with privacy, identity, community and friendship on SNS, ethical debates about the impact of SNS on civil discourse, freedom and democracy in the public sphere must be seen as extensions of a broader discussion about the political implications of the Internet, one that predates Web 2.0 standards. Much of the literature on this subject focuses on the question of whether the Internet encourages or hampers the free exercise of deliberative public reason, in a manner informed by Jürgen Habermas’s (1992/1998) account of discourse ethics and deliberative democracy in the public sphere (Ess 1996 and 2005b; Dahlberg 2001; Bohman 2008). A related topic of concern is SNS fragmentation of the public sphere by encouraging the formation of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’: informational silos for like-minded individuals who deliberately shield themselves from exposure to alternative views. Early worries that such insularity would promote extremism and the reinforcement of ill-founded opinions, while also preventing citizens of a democracy from recognizing their shared interests and experiences (Sunstein 2008), have unfortunately proven to be well-founded (as noted in section 2.3.2). Early optimism that SNS would facilitate popular revolutions resulting in the overthrow of authoritarian regimes (Marturano 2011; Frick and Oberprantacher 2011) have likewise given way to the darker reality that SNS are perhaps even more easily used as tools to popularize authoritarian and totalitarian movements, or foster genocidal impulses, as in the use of Facebook to drive violence against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar (BBC 2018).

When SNS in particular are considered in light of these questions, some distinctive considerations arise. First, sites like Facebook and Twitter (as opposed to narrower SNS utilities such as LinkedIn) facilitate the sharing of, and exposure to, an extremely diverse range of types of discourse. On any given day on Facebook a user may encounter in her NewsFeed a link to an article in a respected political magazine followed by a video of a cat in a silly costume, followed by a link to a new scientific study, followed by a lengthy status update someone has posted about their lunch, followed by a photo of a popular political figure overlaid with a clever and subversive caption. Vacation photos are mixed in with political rants, invitations to cultural events, birthday reminders and data-driven graphs created to undermine common political, moral or economic beliefs. Thus while a user has a tremendous amount of liberty to choose which forms of discourse to pay closer attention to, and tools with which to hide or prioritize the posts of certain members of her network, the sheer diversity of the private and public concerns of her fellows would seem to offer at least some measure of protection against the extreme insularity and fragmentation of discourse that is incompatible with the public sphere.

Yet in practice, the function of hidden platform algorithms can defeat this diversity. Trained on user behavior to optimize for engagement and other metrics that advertisers and platform companies associate with their profit, these algorithms can ensure that I experience only a pale shadow of the true diversity of my social network, seeing at the top of my feed only those posts that I am most likely to find subjectively rewarding to engage with. If, for example, I support the Black Lives Matter movement, and tend to close the app in frustration and disappointment whenever I see BLM denigrated by someone I consider a friend, the platform algorithm can easily learn this association and optimize my experience for one that is more conducive to retaining my presence. It is important to note, however, that in this case the effect is an interaction between the algorithm and my own behavior. How much responsibility for echo chambers and resulting polarization or insularity falls upon users, and how much on the designers of algorithms that track and amplify our expressed preferences?

Philosophers of technology often speak of the affordances or gradients of particular technologies in given contexts (Vallor 2010) insofar as they make certain patterns of use more attractive or convenient for users (while not rendering alternative patterns impossible). Thus while I can certainly seek out posts that will cause me discomfort or anxiety, the platform gradient will not be designed to facilitate such experiences. Yet it is not obvious if or when it should be designed to do so. As Alexis Elder notes (2020), civic discourse on social media can be furthered rather than inhibited by prudent use of tools enabling disconnection. Additionally, a platform affordance that makes a violent white supremacist feel accepted, valued, safe and respected in their social milieu (precisely for their expressed attitudes and beliefs in white supremacist violence) facilitates harm to others, in a way that a platform affordance that makes an autistic person or a transgender woman feel accepted, valued, safe and respected for who they are, does not. Fairness and equity in SNS platform design do not entail neutrality. Ethics explicitly demands non-neutrality between harm and nonharm, between justice and injustice. But ethics also requires epistemic anchoring in reality. Thus even if my own attitudes and beliefs harm no one, I may still have a normative epistemic duty to avoid the comfort of a filter bubble. Do SNS platforms have a duty to keep their algorithms from helping me into one? In truth, those whose identities are historically marginalized will rarely have the luxury of the filter bubble option; online and offline worlds consistently offer stark reminders of their marginalization. So how do SNS designers, users, and regulators mitigate the deleterious political and epistemic effects of filter bubble phenomena without making platforms more inhospitable to vulnerable groups than they already are?

One must also ask whether SNS can skirt the dangers of a plebiscite model of democratic discourse, in which minority voices are dispersed and drowned out by the many. Certainly, compared to the ‘one-to-many’ channels of communication favored by traditional media, SNS facilitate a ‘many-to-many’ model of communication that appears to lower the barriers to participation in civic discourse for everyone, including the marginalized. However, SNS lack the institutional structures necessary to ensure that minoritized voices enjoy not only free , but substantively equal access to the deliberative function of the public sphere.

We must also consider the quality of informational exchanges on SNS and the extent to which they promote a genuinely dialogical and deliberative public sphere marked by the exercise of critical rationality. SNS norms tend to privilege brevity and immediate impact over substance and depth in communication; Vallor (2012) suggests that this bodes poorly for the cultivation of those communicative virtues essential to a flourishing public sphere. This worry is only reinforced by empirical data suggesting that SNS perpetuate the ‘Spiral of Silence’ phenomenon that results in the passive suppression of divergent views on matters of important political or civic concern (Hampton et. al. 2014). In a related critique, Frick and Oberprantacher (2011) claim that the ability of SNS to facilitate public ‘sharing’ can obscure the deep ambiguity between sharing as “a promising, active participatory process” and “interpassive, disjointed acts of having trivia shared .” (2011, 22)

There remains a notable gap online between the prevalence of democratic discourse and debate—which require only the open voicing of opinions and reasons, respectively—and the relative absence of democratic deliberation , which requires the joint exercise of collective intentions, cooperation and compromise as well as a shared sense of reality on which to act. The greatest moral challenges of our time—responding to the climate change crisis, developing sustainable patterns of economic and social life, managing global threats to public health—aren’t going to be solved by ideological warfare but by deliberative, coordinated exercise of public wisdom. Today’s social media platforms are great for cultivating the former; for the latter, not so much.

Another vital issue for online democracy relates to the contentious debate emerging on social media platforms about the extent to which controversial or unpopular speech ought to be tolerated or punished by private actors, especially when the consequences manifest in traditional offline contexts and spaces such as the university. For example, the norms of academic freedom in the U.S. were greatly destabilized by the ‘Salaita Affair’ (in which a tenured job offer by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to Steven Salaita was withdrawn on the basis of his tweets criticizing Israel) and several other cases in which academics were censured or otherwise punished by their institutions as a result of their controversial social media posts (Protevi 2018). Yet how should we treat a post by a professor that expresses a desire to sleep with their students, or that expresses their doubts about the intelligence of women, or the integrity of students of a particular nationality? It remains to be seen what equilibrium can be found between moral accountability and free expression in communities increasingly mediated by SNS communications. A related debate concerns the ethical and social value of the kind of social media acts of moral policing frequently derided as insincere or performative ‘virtue signaling.’ To what extent are social media platforms a viable stage for moral performances, and are such performances merely performative? Are they inherently ‘grandstanding’ abuses of moral discourse (Tosi and Warmke 2020), or can they in fact be positive forces for social progress and reform (Levy 2020, Westra 2021)?

It also remains to be seen to what extent civic discourse and activism on SNS will continue to be manipulated or compromised by the commercial interests that currently own and manage the technical infrastructure. This concern is driven by the growing economic and political influence of companies in the technology sector, what Luciano Floridi (2015b) calls ‘grey power,’ and the potentially disenfranchising and disempowering effects of an economic model in which most users play a passive role (Floridi 2015a). Indeed, the relationship between social media users and service providers has become increasingly contentious, as users struggle to demand more privacy, better data security and more effective protections from online harassment in an economic context where they have little or no direct bargaining power (Zuboff 2019).

This imbalance was powerfully illustrated by the revelation in 2014 that Facebook researchers had quietly conducted psychological experiments on users without their knowledge, manipulating their moods by altering the balance of positive or negative items in their News Feeds (Goel 2014). The study added yet another dimension to existing concerns about the ethics and validity of social science research that relies on SNS-generated data (Buchanan and Zimmer 2012), concerns that drive an increasingly vital and contested area of research ethics (Woodfield 2018, franzke et al. 2020).

Ironically, in the power struggle between users and SNS providers, social networking platforms themselves have become the primary battlefield, where users vent their collective outrage in an attempt to force service providers into responding to their demands. The results are sometimes positive, as when Twitter users, after years of complaining, finally shamed the company in 2015 into providing better reporting tools for online harassment. Yet by its nature the process is chaotic and often controversial, as when later that year, Reddit users successfully demanded the ouster of CEO Ellen Pao, under whose leadership Reddit had banned some of its more repugnant ‘subreddit’ forums (such as “Fat People Hate”).

The only clear consensus emerging from the considerations outlined here is that if SNS are going to facilitate any enhancement of a Habermasian public sphere, or the civic virtues and praxes of reasoned discourse that any functioning public sphere must presuppose, then users will have to actively mobilize themselves to exploit such an opportunity (Frick and Oberprantacher 2011). Such mobilization may depend upon resisting the “false sense of activity and accomplishment” (Bar-Tura, 2010, 239) that may come from merely clicking ‘Like’ in response to acts of meaningful political speech, forwarding calls to sign petitions, or simply ‘following’ an outspoken social critic on Twitter whose ‘tweeted’ calls to action are drowned in a tide of corporate announcements, celebrity product endorsements and personal commentaries. Some argue that it will also require the cultivation of new norms and virtues of online civic-mindedness, without which online ‘democracies’ will continue to be subject to the self-destructive and irrational tyrannies of mob behavior (Ess 2010).

SNS are hosts for a broad spectrum of ‘cybercrimes’ and related direct harms, including but not limited to: cyberbullying/cyberharassment, cyberstalking, child exploitation, cyberextortion, cyberfraud, illegal surveillance, identity theft, intellectual property/copyright violations, cyberespionage, cybersabotage and cyberterrorism. Each of these forms of criminal or antisocial behavior has a history that well pre-dates Web 2.0 standards, and philosophers have tended to leave the specific correlations between cybercrime and SNS as an empirical matter for social scientists, law enforcement and Internet security firms to investigate. Nevertheless, cybercrime is an enduring topic of philosophical interest for the broader field of computer ethics, and the migration to and evolution of such crime on SNS platforms raises new and distinctive ethical issues.

Among those of great ethical importance is the question of how SNS providers ought to respond to government demands for user data for investigative or counterterrorism purposes. SNS providers are caught between the public interest in crime prevention and their need to preserve the trust and loyalty of their users, many of whom view governments as overreaching in their attempts to secure records of online activity. Many companies have opted to favor user security by employing end-to-end encryption of SNS exchanges, much to the chagrin of government agencies who insist upon ‘backdoor’ access to user data in the interests of public safety and national security.

A related feature of SNS abuse and cybercrime is the associated skyrocketing need for content moderation at scale by these platforms. Because automated tools for content moderation remain crude and easily gamed, social media platforms rely on large human workforces working for low wages, who must manually screen countless images of horrific violence and abuse, often suffering grave and lasting psychological harm as a result (Roberts 2019). It is unclear how such harms to the content moderating workforce can be morally justified, even if they help to prevent the spread of such harm to others. The arrangement has uncomfortable echoes of Ursula LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas ; so should platform users be the ones walking away? Or do platforms have an ethical duty to find a morally permissible solution, even if it endangers their business model?

Another emerging ethical concern is the increasingly political character of cyberharassment and cyberstalking. In the U.S., women who spoke out about the lack of diversity in the tech and videogame industries were early targets during online controversies such as 2014’s ‘Gamergate’ (Salter 2017), during which some victims were forced to cancel speaking appearances or leave their homes due to physical threats after their addresses and other personal info were posted on social media (a practice known as ‘doxing’ or ‘doxxing’). More recently, journalists have been doxed and subjected to violent threats, sometimes following accusations that their reporting itself constituted doxing (Wilson 2018).

Doxing presents complex ethical challenges (Douglas 2016). For victims of doxing and associated cyberthreats, traditional law enforcement bodies offer scant protection, as these agencies are often ill-equipped to police the blurry boundary between online and physical harms. But moreover, it’s not always clear what distinguishes immoral doxing from justified social opprobrium. If someone records a woman spitting racial epithets in a passerby’s face, or a man denying a disabled person service in a restaurant, and the victim or an observer posts the video online in a manner that allows the perpetrator to be identified by others in their social network, is that unethical shaming or just deserts? What’s the difference between posting someone’s home address, allowing them and their family to be terrorized by a mob, and posting someone’s workplace so that their employer can consider their conduct? Cases such as these get adjudicated by ad hoc social media juries weekly. Sometimes legal consequences do follow, as in the case of the notorious Amy Cooper, who in 2020 was charged with filing a false police report after being filmed by a Black man who she falsely accused of threatening her in Central Park. Are doxing and other modes of social media shaming legitimate tools of justice? Or are they indications of the dangers of unregulated moral policing? And if the answer is ‘both,’ or ‘it depends,’ then what are the key moral distinctions that allow us to respond appropriately to this new practice?

A host of metaethical questions are raised by the rapid emergence of SNS. For example, SNS lend new data to an earlier philosophical debate (Tavani 2005; Moor 2008) about whether classical ethical traditions such as utilitarianism, Kantian ethics or virtue ethics possess sufficient resources for illuminating the implications of emerging information technology for moral values , or whether we require a new ethical framework to handle such phenomena. Charles Ess (2006, 2021) has suggested that a new, pluralistic “global information ethics” may be the appropriate context from which to view novel information technologies. Other scholars have suggested that technologies such as SNS invite renewed attention to existing ethical approaches such as pragmatism (van den Eede 2010), virtue ethics (Vallor 2016) feminist or care ethics (Hamington 2010; Puotinen 2011) that have often been neglected by applied ethicists in favor of conventional utilitarian and deontological resources.

A related metaethical project relevant to SNS is the development of an explicitly intercultural information ethics (Ess 2005a; Capurro 2008; Honglaradom and Britz 2010). SNS and other emerging information technologies do not reliably confine themselves to national or cultural boundaries, and this creates a particular challenge for applied ethicists. For example, SNS practices in different countries must be analyzed against a conceptual background that recognizes and accommodates complex differences in moral norms and practices (Capurro 2005; Hongladarom 2007, Wong 2013). SNS phenomena that one might expect to benefit from intercultural analysis include: varied cultural patterns and preference/tolerance for affective display, argument and debate, personal exposure, expressions of political, interfamilial or cultural criticism, religious expression and sharing of intellectual property. Alternatively, the very possibility of a coherent information ethics may come under challenge, for example, from a constructivist view that emerging socio-technological practices like SNS continually redefine ethical norms—such that our analyses of SNS and related technologies are not only doomed to operate from shifting ground, but from ground that is being shifted by the intended object of our ethical analysis.

Finally, there are pressing practical concerns about whether and how philosophers can actually have an impact on the ethical profile of emerging technologies such as SNS. If philosophers direct their ethical analyses only to other philosophers, then such analyses may function simply as ethical postmortems of human-technology relations, with no opportunity to actually pre-empt, reform or redirect unethical technological practices. But to whom else can, or should, these ethical concerns be directed: SNS users? Regulatory bodies and political institutions? SNS software developers? How can the theoretical content and practical import of these analyses be made accessible to these varied audiences? What motivating force are they likely to have?

These questions have become particularly acute of late with the controversy over alleged corporate capture by technology companies of the language of ethics, and associated charges of ‘ethics-washing’ (Green 2021 [Other Internet Resources], Bietti 2020). Some argue that ethics is the wrong tool to fight the harms of emerging technologies and large technology platforms (Hao 2021); yet alternative proposals to focus on justice, rights, harms, equity or the legitimate use of power unwittingly fall right back within the normative scope of ethics. Unless we resort to a cynical frame of ‘might makes right,’ there is no escaping the need to use ethics to distinguish the relationships with sociotechnical phenomena and powers that we regard as permissible, good, or right, from those that should be resisted and dismantled.

The profound urgency of this task becomes apparent once we recognize that unlike those ‘life or death’ ethical dilemmas with which many applied ethicists are understandably often preoccupied (e.g., abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment), emerging information technologies such as SNS have in a very short time worked themselves into the daily moral fabric of virtually all of our lives, transforming the social landscape and the moral habits and practices with which we navigate it. The ethical concerns illuminated here are, in a very real sense, anything but ‘academic,’ and neither philosophers nor the broader human community can afford the luxury of treating them as such.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Green, B., 2021, “ The Contestation of Tech Ethics: A Sociotechnical Approach to Ethics and Technology in Action,” manuscript available at arXiv.org .
• Weinberg, J. 2020, “ Illusion and Agreement in the Debate Over Intolerance ,” Daily Noûs , July 9, 2020.
• Social Networking , Pew Research Center, Internet and American Life Project.
• Electronic Privacy Information Center .

Aristotle, General Topics: ethics | character, moral | computing: and moral responsibility | ethics: search engines and | ethics: virtue | Habermas, Jürgen | information technology: and moral values | information technology: and privacy | information technology: phenomenological approaches to ethics and | personal identity: and ethics | privacy | publicity | technology, philosophy of

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34 Ethical Issues in Internet Culture and New Media

Anthony Cross is assistant professor of philosophy at Texas State University.

• Published: 16 August 2023
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The omnipresence of the internet in the twenty-first century has brought with it an explosion of new artistic media, including memes, viral videos, social media posts, and other distinctive manifestations of internet culture. These new media are largely participatory, ephemeral, and even anonymous, yet they offer important new opportunities for artistic expression. This chapter highlights their ethical significance along three main dimensions. First, the chapter focuses on how the everyday aesthetic choices afforded by online curation, filters, and internet aesthetics provide new opportunities for the expression and creation of individual identities. Second, the chapter surveys the ways that internet memes and other participatory media contribute to the formation and expression of communities with shared values. Third, the chapter discusses ethical challenges associated with ownership and attribution of instances of these media: Can anyone claim ownership of a meme? And what might such ownership consist in?

Introduction

The omnipresence of the internet in the twenty-first century has brought with it enormous changes in our everyday life; digital media have reconfigured our epistemic networks, altered our social relationships and our senses of self, and reconfigured our agency in ways that we have only recently begun to understand. It should be no surprise, then, that these media have also enabled new forms of aesthetic activity, many of which are rife with ethical significance.

This chapter focuses on the new media characteristic of internet culture: internet memes, viral videos, social media posts, and so on. These new media are largely participatory, ephemeral, and anonymous, yet they offer important new opportunities for everyday aesthetic expression which have, to date, largely been ignored by philosophers. This chapter highlights the ethical significance of these new media along three main dimensions. First, the chapter focuses on how the everyday aesthetic choices afforded by online curation, filters, and internet “aesthetics” provide new opportunities for the expression and creation of individual identities. Second, the chapter surveys the ways that internet memes and other participatory media contribute to the formation and expression of communities with shared values. Third, the chapter discusses ethical challenges associated with ownership and attribution of instances of these media: can anyone claim ownership of a meme? And what might such ownership consist in? The chapter concludes by considering the significance of these emerging media as a whole as a radically distributed, accessible, and powerful form of folk art.

Before going any further, it will be helpful to distinguish the focus of this chapter from what is often referred to as computer art, net art, and postinternet art. These labels are generally used to refer to the works of established artists that in some way or other take advantage of the affordances of digital media and the internet. Computer art is defined by reference to its interactivity—that is, its involvement of a user in the generation of the art’s display ( Lopes 2009 ). Net art consists in artists making work that in some way or other makes creative usage of internet technology ( Ippolito 2002 ), while postinternet art consists in art-making that acknowledges and accommodates the role of the internet in artistic production and distribution ( McHugh 2011 ). While these are useful categories for understanding contemporary developments in the artworld, they are less helpful in tracking the kinds of everyday aesthetic practices and activities that are common to many users of the internet. When creating an internet meme, reposting a viral video, curating a profile, or writing fan fiction, one engages in an exercise of what media theorist Jean Burgess has referred to as vernacular creativity: “everyday cultural production that makes sense in the context of contemporary transformations in culture and new media technologies” ( Burgess 2007 , 29). These everyday exercises of cultural production have largely fallen outside the focus of the philosophy of art—although the recent emergence of the field of “everyday aesthetics” represents an important corrective to this trend ( Saito 2021 ). This chapter takes these practices to constitute a sphere of aesthetic activity which we can refer to as internet culture—a culture which combines features of more traditional forms of vernacular culture with the affordances of digital media and the internet.

Are there any distinguishing features of internet culture? One suggestion is that much internet culture shares a common aesthetic. According to critic Nick Douglas, much of internet culture is marked by a style he refers to as “Internet Ugly”: an aesthetic encouraging pairing willful amateurism with absurd, surreal, or ambiguous content ( Douglas 2014 ). By contrast, media theorists Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner have argued that the distinguishing feature of much internet culture is weirdness —a kind of ambivalence and oddity that stands in marked contrast to predominant cultural values ( Phillips and Milner 2017 , 9–13). While these styles are prevalent, they aren’t universal; there is a great deal of internet culture that fails to demonstrate the requisite ugliness or weirdness. Consider the aspirational content common to many Instagram accounts, consisting largely of “muted pastel palettes and washed-out backgrounds; flatlay still lifes, personal items painstakingly arranged for best visual appeal” ( Leaver, Highfield, and Abidin 2020 , 62). The aesthetic practices governing the curation, editing, and posting of such images could hardly be further from demonstrating an aesthetic of ugliness or weirdness.

Even so, these styles point us toward more promising means of distinguishing internet culture—not in terms of a unified style or content, but rather in terms of its primary modes of creation and dissemination. For one, a great deal of internet culture is participatory : users are encouraged to engage with internet culture by way of sharing, iterating and implementing it themselves ( Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013 , 153–194). In making and sharing internet memes, for example, users alter and redeploy the meme to suit their interests and contexts, reposting it and sharing it to their own networks and communities ( Shifman 2014a ). The DIY amateurism of Internet Ugly flourishes in this context as both a reflection of participatory culture and a way of rendering participation more accessible.

Internet culture is also distanced from our ordinary, embodied identities—this means that much internet culture is either anonymous or pseudonymous . The distance afforded by digital mediation allows for a great deal of our participation in internet culture to be as isolated and distinct from our embodied selves as we wish; as the joke goes, “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” This distancing effect lends itself to the flourishing of the weird and sometimes even antagonistic culture Phillips and Milner refer to as the ambivalent internet ( Phillips and Milner 2017 , 50–51).

At the same time, much internet culture is authorless : users participate, share, and iterate collectively without any marks of authorship or attribution. In this respect, internet culture resembles more traditional forms of folk culture, such as oral traditions like joke-telling and folk-song: the culture is free to be shared and iterated as users see fit. This is not to say that there are no rules or norms for the production and dissemination of internet culture; as Ryan Milner argues, a great deal of internet meme culture is governed by both formal and informal gatekeeping, in which users collectively enforce norms surrounding the format of memes ( Milner 2018 , 36–37). However, all of this is compatible with much internet culture eschewing attribution to any particular individual ( Davison 2012 , 132).

A final feature of internet culture is its spread . Because internet media can be quickly replicated and disseminated across networks, internet culture can spread rapidly. An individual hashtag, GIF, or meme can be shared and iterated across many networks and redeployed in different communities or collectives for more specific purposes ( Denisova 2019 , 44–53). This “spreadability” is, in principle, not different from the way that more traditional vernacular culture spreads; what differentiates internet culture is only the speed and scale at which the spread occurs.

In the sections below, I highlight the ethical significance of the emergence of internet culture. First, I discuss the extent to which the development of our online identities through participation in internet culture is ethically significant. I’ll then turn to the ethical significance of community and the extent to which internet culture facilitates community. Finally, I’ll turn to questions surrounding the ownership of internet culture.

Internet Culture and Identity

It is a rather common notion that our aesthetic choices both express and construct our identities. We are beset by aesthetic opportunities, and as agents we must chart a path through our aesthetic lives on the basis of our judgments about aesthetic value. Most of these choices, as Kevin Melchionne argues, will have rather low stakes and will involve relaxed deliberation: we make such choices about which movies to stream, which outfits to wear, or how much salt to put in the soup ( Melchionne 2017 ). Some might be more significant: everything can hang on a painter’s selection of color or a poet’s choice of words. But perhaps more important than any single aesthetic choice is the way that such choices, over time, come to express our identities: our choices might cohere into a broader pattern that reflects our individual sensibilities ( Cohen 1998 ). As Nick Riggle has argued, matching our aesthetic choices to our personal ideals—aesthetic and otherwise—would be an achievement of individual style ( Riggle 2015 ). It is arguably an aesthetic and perhaps even an ethical achievement to develop a distinctive style—one which sets us apart from others in notable or significant ways ( Nehamas 2007 , 84–91).

The internet presents a novel set of opportunities for making such aesthetic choices. The participatory nature of much internet culture actively involves users in aesthetic choices that go well beyond passive appreciation: users are invited to respond, to iterate, to share, and to curate. At the same time, the anonymity or pseudonymity of much internet culture encourages users to play with developing new identities and sensibilities. Finally, the affordances of digital media provide shortcuts to style—ranging from algorithmic suggestions to Instagram filters to ready-made internet “aesthetics.” This section explores the ways in which the internet, considered as a context for aesthetic choice, can lead to ethically significant impacts on our identities.

Anonymity, Identity, and Play

As already noted, much of our interaction with internet culture is participatory; users are invited to actively engage by sharing, liking, iterating, and adapting. In this respect, internet culture is quite similar to more traditional forms of participatory culture, insofar as it creates extensive opportunities for vernacular creativity ( Howard 2008 ). However, users’ participation in internet culture is distinguished from more traditional cultural forms by its lack of embodiment and the anonymity and pseudonymity this invites; as argued below, this allows users to play —to try out different sensibilities and identities with a freedom not available in more traditional, embodied forms of cultural participation.

This is not to say that we should expect everyone to develop an online persona radically different from the one manifest in their embodied interactions and relationships; as Nancy Baym notes, although “the affordances of new media open up new possibilities for exploring and representing ourselves and others…it turns out that, with some significant exceptions, most people, most of the time, use new media to act in ways mostly consistent with their embodied selves” ( Baym 2015 , 118). What the absence of embodiment affords is a greater degree of freedom with respect to one’s self-expression and self-disclosure: users have full control over whether to reveal certain aspects of themselves relevant to the sensibilities or styles they aim to cultivate. Such control may be lacking in embodied contexts, insofar as one lacks full control over what is disclosed through one’s bodily appearance and activity ( Cocking 2008 ).

At the same time, the platforms responsible for the creation and distribution of much internet culture allow users to mask their identities in ways that encourage departures from one’s embodied self. Image boards like 4chan allow for complete anonymity in one’s contributions, while message boards, Reddit, and social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram allow for pseudonymity—users are invited to post contributions under any username they choose. 1

The combination of these features allows users greater freedom to play in their aesthetic choices by constructing new identities and presenting themselves to new communities. Consider the ease with which one can create new profiles on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, or Reddit. These new profiles might be dedicated to particular aesthetic projects: creating and sharing niche memes, parodying public figures, or posting fan fiction. Just as easily, users can enter into networks and communities surrounding these aesthetic practices by subscribing to appropriate subreddits, following other users, or joining an interest-based internet forum. These choices and activities have very low stakes: if some particular aesthetic identity isn’t working out, it can simply be abandoned in favor of something new. The benefit of this ease is that we’re encouraged to think explicitly about and actively choose our identities through aesthetic experimentation and play, thereby expanding the range of our aesthetic agency.

At the same time, this sense of freedom and play is not without its downsides. Whitney Phillips argues that subcultural trolling is largely dependent on anonymity; negative and antagonistic engagement online is often dependent on maintaining a barrier between one’s online activity and one’s everyday embodied self ( Phillips 2015 , 25). 2 There’s also little doubt that a great deal of racist, sexist, and otherwise morally repugnant content is created and circulated online due to a perceived insulation of users from any significant repercussions ( Milner 2018 , 115–149). Consider the example of an online community dedicated to sharing fan art of the Colorado movie theater mass shooter, James Holmes ( Broderick 2012 ). Self-styled “Holmies” aren’t alone; similar online fan movements have emerged surrounding other mass shooters and terrorists ( Phillips and Milner 2017 , 5–6). It’s unlikely that individuals would participate in sharing this content without the perceived protections of anonymity and pseudonymity.

Online identity play also invites a risk of fragmentation of identity—the sense that one’s online self is radically distinct from one’s IRL self. 3 In some cases, the aesthetic choices and projects that we develop online may become central to our broader sense of our personalities. However, there may be cases in which these online projects and relationships fail to integrate with other aspects of our self-conception. This is especially likely when the sensibilities that we develop and cultivate online are at odds with one’s other values; Phillips points out that many online trolls regard their trolling selves—their identities as circulators of antagonistic and immoral internet culture—as radically distinct from their personal identity ( Phillips 2015 , 34–36). The risk of such fragmentation is plausibly exacerbated by the affordances of anonymity and pseudonymity; it is certainly easier to maintain distances between one’s aesthetic identities insofar as they aren’t publicly connected.

To what extent should we be concerned about such fragmentation? Some philosophers have argued that self-integration is a necessary constituent of the good life ( Cottingham 2010 ). To the extent that such fragmentation makes total self-integration more difficult, there is perhaps some cause for concern that the ease of identity play online will undermine this ethical project. Then again, not all philosophers agree that complete self-integration is a necessary condition for living a good life; some argue that fragmentary and episodic lives are nevertheless consistent with individual flourishing ( Strawson 2004 ).

Algorithms and Choice

By making decisions with respect to what we engage with aesthetically and how we do so, we exercise our autonomy by way of our aesthetic choices. C. Thi Nguyen has argued that we insist on such autonomy because we value the process of engaging with aesthetic objects—a process that involves individual discovery, exploration, and judgment ( Nguyen 2020 ).

One salient feature of many of the platforms used to disseminate internet culture is their personalization. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok make use of algorithms which predict, on the basis of a user’s past activity, what kinds of content will be most engaging to the user; content will then be provided to the user on the basis of these predictions. Many have raised epistemological, moral, and political concerns about the effects of personalized content filtering ( Pariser 2011 ). What is less appreciated is the extent to which such filtering affects our online aesthetic activities and practices.

Kevin Melchionne argues that insofar as streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify provide algorithmic recommendations, they help us to solve a serious problem of aesthetic choice: how to navigate an overwhelming array of aesthetic opportunities in ways that will be productive to our aesthetic flourishing ( Melchionne 2017 ). It’s true that there is a similar problem of choice with respect to internet culture: we are awash in memes, viral videos, social media accounts, and online communities, and it can be quite difficult to know in advance what kinds of engagement will be worthwhile. By comparing our past choices on a platform to those of other users whose activity is similar, algorithmic filtering can often help direct us toward content that will be interesting or rewarding for us.

At the same time, the algorithms used to analyze our past choices can be helpful to us as a source of information about our sensibilities. Spotify, for example, provides year-end analyses of users’ listening habits. It might be helpful to learn from this analysis that one has consistently engaged with a particular genre of music or video. If you learn, for example, that you’ve been listening to more and more art pop, this might help you to explicitly recognize this tendency as part of your sensibility, which you can then try to develop further.

However, this filtering might give us cause for concern for two reasons. First, insofar as an algorithm selects and presents content to you on the basis of your past behavior and choices, it may be less likely to provide you with opportunities to develop new aesthetic interests. Instead, the algorithm might lock you into what Eli Pariser has called the “you loop”—a cycle in which your initial actions trap you into an identity cascade in which you’re served only content relevant to your initial identity cues. Engagement with this content further cements the algorithm’s understanding of your identity, leading to more and more of the same kinds of content ( Pariser 2011 , 127). The result is that our aesthetic lives online are closed off from accident, happenstance, and surprise discovery; as a result, we are less likely to stumble into new opportunities for aesthetic appreciation and agency.

The second cause for concern about algorithmic filtering is that it is almost always opaque to users just how and to what extent their content is being personalized and filtered. Although some social media platforms are willing to publish the information collected about their users’ past activity, almost no platforms disclose how their algorithms operate to select and filter content. Insofar as users are unaware of filtering, this can undermine users’ ability to consent—and thereby compromise users’ autonomy in engaging with internet culture.

How might we respond to these two concerns? There may be straightforward means of counteracting the first: users might take steps to “retrain” the algorithm by searching for and selecting content outside of their established areas of interest. Alternatively, users can rely on personal recommendations—from friends and family but also from critics and influencers. Finally, users might frequent online platforms such as internet forums and message boards that are not algorithmically filtered. Each of these strategies can lead to exposure to new and unexplored areas of internet culture. The second concern is only serious to the extent that users value complete autonomy in their aesthetic exploration. It may be that many users are willing to sacrifice some of their autonomy in the interest of an efficient solution to the problem of aesthetic choice; what ultimately matters may not simply be aesthetic autonomy, but rather which contexts for aesthetic choice lead to the most rich and rewarding lives.

Shortcuts to Style

A further affordance of internet culture is the extent to which individual platforms offer preconstructed stylistic choices. Consider the example of the Instagram filter: users are able to select between a variety of stylized filters to apply to images they post on the platform. These filters, featuring evocative names like “Nashville,” “Toaster,” and “Inkwell,” each apply a preconfigured set of adjustments to images meant to be reminiscent of vintage analogue photographs ( Leaver, Highfield, and Abidin 2020 ). This is one case of what we might call a “shortcut to style.” 4

Another case is the set of so-called internet aesthetics: online stylistic trends such as dark academia, cottagecore, VSCO, and goblincore spread largely through social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. These styles are highly codified and standardized by practitioners, who publish guides focusing on fashion choices, visual style, media influences, and even typefaces. As such, it’s fairly easy to adopt an internet aesthetic: one need simply string together a few themed and tagged posts on social media featuring one’s internet aesthetic ( Cross 2020 ).

Preexisting styles aren’t a new phenomenon—examples of earlier stylistic templates include punk culture and queer ballroom culture. What distinguishes online styles and aesthetics is the ease with which users can toggle back and forth between different styles. This ease encourages the sort of play with respect to identity discussed above; because of the low stakes, one can easily try out a variety of different styles and sensibilities. Furthermore, users are encouraged to think of individual style as a matter of choice, open to revision through experimentation.

At the same time, insofar as these shortcuts to style are highly codified—and, in the case of Instagram filters, opaque in their operations to the user—there is a risk that settling simply for these prepackaged styles will circumscribe and constrain users’ agency in developing individual style. This is especially a concern in cases where stylistic shortcuts are developed in a top-down way by various platforms, rather than through the activities of users themselves. 5

Internet Culture, Community, and Politics

The previous section argued that participation in internet culture can have ethically significant impacts on an individual’s identity. This section turns from the intrapersonal to the interpersonal: it focuses on the impact of internet culture on our relationships with others. Rather than taking up these issues at a highly general level, this section instead focuses on an in-depth case study of perhaps the most dominant form of internet culture—the internet meme. Drawing on resources from media theory as well as the philosophy of art, the section first develops a working theory of the nature of internet memes. Following this, I discuss the possibility that we might form ethically significant communities on the internet; I then argue that the creation and propagation of memes is an increasingly prevalent means of forming and maintaining such communities. Finally, I consider the political significance of internet memes.

A Working Theory of Internet Memes

Most discussions of internet memes—including this one—begin with a reference to Richard Dawkins’s initial coinage of the term “meme” as the cultural analog of the gene: the smallest replicating unit of culture, transmitted from individual to individual through communication and observation ( Dawkins 1989 ). While there is a vibrant discussion as to whether this notion of a meme is applicable to contemporary internet culture, 6 this chapter focuses on the slightly narrower categories of internet memes. This is a rather diverse category of internet phenomena that includes images, videos, animations, texts, and hashtags spread through social media, websites, and email. Especially popular examples of the category include Pepe the Frog (discussed further below), the Distracted Boyfriend meme, and the #yesallwomen hashtag. Most internet users will have encountered at least some members of this category through social media, online forums, browsing, or email; a somewhat smaller portion will have actively contributed to the propagation of internet memes by creating, sharing, or using them.

Internet memes are, in Ryan Milner’s terminology, multimodal: they incorporate text, images, audio, video, and hypertext ( Milner 2018 , 25). However, many of the most notable examples are image-based—that is, they centrally involve some photographic or pictorial content, often paired with superimposed text elements ( Shifman 2014a ). Sometimes referred to as “image macros,” these image-based memes began circulating among users of internet forums such as 4chan and Reddit around 2004 or 2005, although the practice—and the memes themselves—quickly spread beyond those communities ( Börzsei 2013 ). Consider the well-known image-based meme of Pepe the Frog. This meme has its origins in a comic strip titled Boy’s Club by artist Matt Furie. In around 2008, users of online message boards like 4chan began adapting one of the comic’s characters, an anthropomorphic frog named Pepe, into a series of reaction images—most notably, Pepe saying “feels good man.” Over time, users adapted the Pepe character into a number of increasingly bizarre contexts, and eventually the meme attained some measure of mainstream popularity.

What exactly is an internet meme? The past decade has seen the emergence of numerous definitions on the part of media theorists. Patrick Davison defines an internet meme as “a piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains influence through online transmission” ( Davison 2012 , 122). Davison’s definition is largely in keeping with Dawkins’s initial characterization of memes as transmissible units of culture; it also likens memes to jokes. However, Davison’s definition is extremely broad—it arguably encompasses all internet culture. Limor Shifman develops a more specific three-part definition, according to which internet memes are “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the internet by many users” ( Shifman 2014b , 7–8). Shifman’s definition specifies that individual instances of a meme share common elements—either content, form, or “stance,” which is understood in terms of the attitude or relation to the meme’s content. Furthermore, Shifman makes clear the requirement that in order to participate in sharing or iterating an instance of a meme, users must be aware of the larger phenomenon of the meme itself. Ryan Milner expands on Shifman’s definition, specifying five central “logics” of memetic media. These include the aforementioned quality of multimodality, along with what Milner refers to as reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread ( Milner 2018 , 22–39). A quick gloss on these elements: memes generally involve reappropriation of existing media through processes of poaching and bricolage; they are the product of collectives, and lack specific authors responsible for their creation. They depend on an emotional effect, or “resonance” for their rapid spread through online networks.

Philosophers of art have appealed to the tools of analytic aesthetics to further theorize internet memes. Let us first distinguish between the instances of a meme—some particular images of Pepe the frog, say—and the Pepe meme itself. Borrowing from the ontology of music, Anthony Cross argues that internet memes themselves are indicated structural types: memes are thematic templates or sets of instructions for generating particular instances—in much the same way that a musical score indicates a structure governing the generation of individual performances ( Cross 2017 ). However, Cross notes, internet memes differ from musical works in that memes are the product of collective authorship, and are furthermore open to collective revision over time. In a similar vein, Simon Evnine argues that memes are artifacts constituted by norms for producing instances; furthermore, Evnine provides a practice-based account of the concept “meme” ( Evnine 2018 ).

Much more could be said about the nature of internet memes, but the above provides enough theory to explain how internet memes demonstrate each of the distinguishing features of internet culture: First, internet memes are participatory, in that they invite users not only to share instances of any particular meme but also to generate their own. Second, internet memes are authorless insofar as they are the product of collective practice rather than the fiat of any particular artist. Finally, internet memes are capable of rapid spread insofar as most instances of the meme can be easily replicated and shared among networks.

Memes, Communities, and Intimacy

Ted Cohen, writing about jokes, argues that all jokes are conditional: in order for a joke to land, and for an audience to find it funny, the audience must meet certain background conditions. 7 Some jokes require shared background knowledge, such as math jokes or philosophy jokes. Other jokes require a shared affective stance; the joke-teller and the audience have to have the same attitudinal orientation toward the subject matter of the joke. When the joke lands, the joke teller and audience are united by a kind of intimacy—what Cohen refers to as “the shared sense of those in a community” facilitated by both a shared outlook on the world and a shared appreciative response to the joke. ( Cohen 1999 , 28).

Philosophical consensus regards communities as normatively significant—although there is a disagreement about whether communities are significant because they are of instrumental value for individuals, or if communities have final value in their own right ( Mason 2000 , 42–63). If Cohen is right, jokes serve as an important means of constructing and maintaining normatively significant communities by generating intimacy.

Much the same story can be told about internet memes; a large part of the value of internet memes lies not so much in their content—which is often sophomoric or bizarre—but rather in their ability to generate precisely the sort of intimacy Cohen describes above. This makes internet memes an especially valuable means of creating and maintaining communities online. Consider the fact that in creating or sharing memes, users take on the role of collective authorship of the meme. Through their activity, they indicate that they are part of the group that understands and appreciates the meme. At the same time, in creating and sharing instances of the meme, users play a role in determining the nature of the meme itself. By creating new instances of the meme, users can shift community practice and ultimately alter or change the meme through their activity. The shared understanding of the meme as well as the resonance of each individual instance of the meme creates intimacy among members of this community.

Of course, one might object that the community of all the users involved in creating and sharing any particular meme is purely a notional one. The community of users of, say, the Distracted Boyfriend meme fails to correspond to any actual community, online or otherwise. Furthermore, some might express skepticism about the possibility that normatively significant online communities exist at all.

With respect to the first of these objections, consider Andrew Mason’s definition of the ordinary notion of community as “a group of people who share a range of values, a way of life, identify with the group and its practices and recognize each other as members of that group” ( Mason 2000 , 21). Although massive, the global set of users of a particular meme does share in the common practice of appreciating and propagating the meme; to this extent, these global memes represent a sort of lingua franca uniting users across the internet ( Denisova 2019 , 44–53). At the same time, global memes are often localized in particular communities. Shifman points out that “global” meme templates are often customized for smaller communities—either by iterating the meme with contents relevant to the community’s interests, or by altering, customizing, or translating the meme to make it more accessible ( Shifman 2014b , 161–179). In such cases, although memes are deployed in preexisting communities, they are nevertheless able to play an important role in generating intimacy within these communities.

Some philosophers have also expressed skepticism about the possibility that online communities constitute genuine, normatively significant communities at all. Gordon Graham, for example, asks whether “a relationship restricted to electronic communication [is] capable of creating the sort of relationship between human beings that ordinary communities are expected to realize” ( Graham 1999 , 145). In particular, Graham expresses concerns about the prospects for a community that consists of anonymous participants, each of which has full control over their self-disclosure. Consider two responses to Graham’s objection: first, many online communities aren’t entirely online. Many social networking platforms provide us with new, mediated forms of communication with our preexisting, real-world communities. Even communities that form online may hold “meet-ups” or establish other forms of face-to-face interaction. Thus we shouldn’t be so quick to assume a hard and fast distinction between online communities and real-world communities. A second response is to argue that even in cases where a community’s interactions occur entirely online, this may nevertheless qualify a genuine, normatively significant community. Nancy Baym argues that these online communities often share features with more traditional communities, including a sense of a shared space and practices, shared identities and roles, common support structures, and interpersonal recognition ( Baym 2015 , 82–100).

Memes are therefore a kind of cultural glue, binding together online communities by generating intimacy. However, because of the ease with which memes are replicated, disseminated, and iterated, a meme based in one community can quickly spread to others. This raises interesting questions about ownership and appropriation of memes: Is it a breach of a community’s intimacy when memes are appropriated by outsiders? 8 To consider a concrete example, let’s return to the case of Pepe the Frog: as discussed earlier, the Pepe meme originated within the community of the image-posting message board 4chan. However, the meme spread virally until Pepe became—like the ubiquitous lolcat—a meme familiar to many mainstream internet users. Members of the original community out of which Pepe emerged took umbrage with the meme’s new popularity and—likely out of a desire to troll mainstream internet users—began to associate Pepe with racist themes. Over time, their campaign worked. Pepe was taken up by white supremacists and those on the so-called alt-right on Twitter, Reddit, and other social networks. This ultimately led to the classification of Pepe as a form of hate speech by the Anti-Defamation League ( Glitsos and Hall 2019 ).

Memes and Politics

The case of Pepe the Frog also demonstrates that internet memes, in addition to their role in developing and maintaining communities, can be politically significant. In the runup to the 2016 US presidential election, Pepe came to be seen as a figurehead for the alt-right—an outsider “deplorable” set apart from the “normies” of mainstream culture. 9 Pepe featured in numerous online communications, including a post from then-nominee Donald Trump’s son’s Instagram account. Hillary Clinton’s campaign even went so far as to publicly denounce the meme and its associations ( Cross 2017 ).

What, exactly, is the political significance of internet memes? As evidenced by the Pepe meme’s significance for the alt-right, memes can be used as a tool to build political communities. Zeynep Tufekci notes that creation and dissemination of memes can help to create a sense of camaraderie and connection among members of a protest or political movement. What’s more, given the ability to rapidly disseminate memes on a massive scale, these memes can function to draw outsiders into the political movement ( Tufekci 2017 , 111–112).

Some argue more broadly that internet memes have reconfigured the public sphere, allowing for the mass expression of viewpoints and perspectives outside the political mainstream. An Xiao Mina traces the use of internet memes in a number of different protest movements, arguing that memes contain the seeds of large-scale social change ( Mina 2019 , 189–190). Ryan Milner argues that any particular meme, because of its iterability and adaptability, is capable of supporting a vibrant public conversation in which numerous voices and views are expressed ( Milner 2018 , 151–184).

Internet Culture, Ownership, and Attribution

This final section will address ethical concerns about the ownership, attribution, and appropriation of internet culture alluded to in the previous section. Let’s once again return to the case of Pepe the Frog: Recall that the meme is based on an image of an anthropomorphic frog appropriated from a comic strip by artist Matt Furie. Initially, Furie responded to the meme’s popularity among the alt-right with a mixture of bemusement and resignation; he conceded that the meme itself didn’t belong to him, and encouraged users to “save Pepe” by sharing positive or kind instances of Pepe ( Serwer 2016 ). However, over time, Furie grew increasingly upset about how his character was being used in the meme; in 2017, he published a comic strip killing off the character of Pepe. He then began to file copyright infringement lawsuits against alt-right websites and publications using images of Pepe. He was ultimately successful in a number of these legal actions, winning financial compensation and take-down orders in a number of cases ( Swinyard 2019 ).

Internet memes—and a great deal of internet culture more generally—involves reappropriation: users share reaction GIFs clipped from television shows and movies; memes draw on stock photographs or well-known pop cultural images; and users constantly appropriate and share images, clips, and texts via their social media accounts. These appropriations almost always occur without the consent of the original source, as in the case of Pepe. Even more notably, many memes feature likenesses of real persons, used against their will; this results in immense amounts of attention being directed toward the individuals who feature in the meme. Consider the well-known “Star Wars Kid” video—a private home video in which Canadian teenager Ghyslain Raza films himself awkwardly performing a mock light-saber duel with a golf club. Raza’s classmates found the video and posted it online without his knowledge or consent; it quickly went viral, attracting an enormous number of views on Youtube and becoming the subject of numerous remixes. The effects on Raza’s well-being were stark: he dropped out of school, was diagnosed with depression, and was ultimately admitted to a children’s psychiatric ward. His parents ultimately sued the classmates who posted the video, leading to a settlement ( Taylor 2020 ).

There are difficult and as-yet-unresolved ethical and legal questions concerning the control that individuals like Furie and Raza ought to have over their appropriated works and likenesses. The internet is an unruly place, and as Jonathan Zittrain notes, we currently lack “an infrastructure of meme propagation…capable of acknowledging and respecting preferences of the real people impacted by these virtual phenomena” ( Zittrain 2014 , 390). This hasn’t stopped these individuals from trying: as mentioned, Furie has had some success in pursuing copyright infringement lawsuits as a means of controlling images of Pepe. Others have appealed to the legal right to be forgotten—the right to have private information about a person removed from the internet. This legal right has been affirmed in the EU and several other jurisdictions, although its implementation has been limited ( Rosen 2011 ).

At the same time, many of these individuals have attempted to benefit from their status as the subjects of memes. For example, Matt Furie has recently taken to selling nonfungible tokens (NFTs) of Pepe the Frog ( Cavna 2021 ). NFTs are crypto tokens, just like Bitcoins and other cryptocurrency: each NFT is a pointer to an address on a publicly verifiable and distributed blockchain. What differentiates NFTs from other forms of cryptocurrency is the fact that each NFT is unique and can’t be interchanged with any other NFT. This makes NFTs especially well-suited to indicating ownership of specific objects, and recently NFTs have been the most favored mechanism for transferring ownership of digital objects like images and film clips. Furie is one of numerous individuals who have sold NFTs of digital content linked to memes; due to the supercharged cryptocurrency market, many of these NFTs have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars ( Rosenblatt 2021 ). Just what is being sold in these transactions? If you were to buy a licensed image of Pepe from Furie via NFT, what you’d be getting would be ownership of that single image. However, owning a one-off Pepe isn’t the same thing as owning the meme itself; it’s arguable that Furie, even if he owns the original image of Pepe, has no claim to the subsequent internet cultural phenomenon of iterating and sharing Pepe memes ( Cross 2021 ).

Who owns the meme itself? Who deserves responsibility for it, and who should have the right to control it? There is an obvious parallel to draw between internet culture and more traditional forms of vernacular creativity and expression: like most folk art, internet culture is participatory, occurs against a background of cultural norms and traditions, and is largely authorless. In these contexts, the most reasonable claims to ownership lie with the members of the community responsible for creating and propagating these cultural forms. So perhaps we should regard internet memes and other forms of internet culture as a kind of cultural property, possessed in common by all users who are members of the community who iterate and propagate it ( Matthes 2018 ). One problem for this approach has already been noted: much internet culture spreads rapidly, and what might begin as a shared practice among members of a small online community can easily expand into a part of global internet culture. This can make it difficult to individuate the particular culture or cultures responsible for the generation and propagation of a meme.

Can internet culture itself be subject to ethically problematic cultural appropriation? In 2010, the clothing retailer Hot Topic began selling a shirt featuring “Rage Guy”—a stick figure face central to the “rage comics” meme then circulating on 4chan, Reddit, and other online message boards. In retaliation for this perceived appropriation of their culture, users of these websites began a campaign of online harassment of the retailer—one which ultimately failed to prevent Hot Topic from continuing to sell the shirt. Nick Douglas points out that in this and other cases of corporate appropriation of internet culture, users object to what they perceive to be inauthentic usage of internet culture by those outside the community ( Douglas 2014 , 334–336). But is this outrage based on too narrow a reading of the community responsible for internet culture? If all users of the internet have a claim to internet culture, what’s to stop any one of us from using its cultural forms for our own purposes?

Given its recent emergence, there is a tendency to write off much internet culture as a mere diversion: we go to social media merely to pass the time, and internet memes are only good for a quick laugh. However, even though most of our engagement with internet culture has low stakes, it nevertheless has major ethical significance: it provides us with important means of developing our identities and constructing communities. Given the ephemerality of most internet culture, its participatory nature, and our relative anonymity, we can approach these ethical projects with a level of freedom and play that we lack in more traditional, embodied contexts. At the same time, the collective nature of much internet culture gives rise to significant ethical concerns about cultural ownership and appropriation. Although worth taking seriously now, it’s likely that these ethical considerations will only grow in significance as we shift even more of our attention and activity online.

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The exception to the rule is Facebook, which enforces a “real name” rule in which users must use the name they use in real life. For more discussion on the effects of real name rule, see Tufekci (2017, 139–146) .

For more on trolling and anonymity in the context of online gaming, see Bartel, “Ethics and Video Games,” and Bartel , this volume.

This is not to endorse the idea that there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between online and “in real life” (IRL) selves, or to endorse the idea that IRL projects and interactions are in any way superior. For an argument against “fetishism” of the IRL, see Jurgenson (2012) .

This is not to imply that posting photos without applying a filter represents a completely neutral, unstyled photograph; as Daniel Star argues, even “#nofilter” photos incorporate the default stylization of one’s digital camera software ( Star 2018 ).

This worry is similar to that expressed by critics of Facebook, such as Zadie Smith, who argues that the platform offers a diminished and technologically constrained model of friendship and personal interaction ( Smith 2010 ).

For in-depth discussion on whether internet memes are memes in Dawkins sense, see Shifman (2014b, 37–63) .

For more discussion, see Butterfield , “Ethics of Humor,” this volume.

For more on cultural appropriation and its links to breaches of intimacy, see Strohl and Nguyen , “Cultural Appropriation,” this volume.

  Nagle (2017) traces the alt-right’s appropriation of 4chan’s stance toward “normies” and its meme culture.

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Thinking Through the Ethics of New Tech…Before There’s a Problem

• Beena Ammanath

Historically, it’s been a matter of trial and error. There’s a better way.

There’s a familiar pattern when a new technology is introduced: It grows rapidly, comes to permeate our lives, and only then does society begin to see and address the problems it creates. But is it possible to head off possible problems? While companies can’t predict the future, they can adopt a sound framework that will help them prepare for and respond to unexpected impacts. First, when rolling out new tech, it’s vital to pause and brainstorm potential risks, consider negative outcomes, and imagine unintended consequences. Second, it can also be clarifying to ask, early on, who would be accountable if an organization has to answer for the unintended or negative consequences of its new technology, whether that’s testifying to Congress, appearing in court, or answering questions from the media. Third, appoint a chief technology ethics officer.

We all want the technology in our lives to fulfill its promise — to delight us more than it scares us, to help much more than it harms. We also know that every new technology needs to earn our trust. Too often the pattern goes like this: A technology is introduced, grows rapidly, comes to permeate our lives, and only then does society begin to see and address any problems it might create.

• BA Beena Ammanath is the Executive Director of the global Deloitte AI Institute, author of the book “Trustworthy AI,” founder of the non-profit Humans For AI, and also leads Trustworthy and Ethical Tech for Deloitte. She is an award-winning senior executive with extensive global experience in AI and digital transformation, spanning across e-commerce, finance, marketing, telecom, retail, software products, services and industrial domains with companies such as HPE, GE, Thomson Reuters, British Telecom, Bank of America, and e*trade.

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Trailblazing initiative marries ethics, tech

Christina Pazzanese

Harvard Staff Writer

Computer science, philosophy faculty ask students to consider how systems affect society

First in a four-part series that taps the expertise of the Harvard community to examine the promise and potential pitfalls of the rising age of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and how to humanize it.

For two decades, the flowering of the Digital Era has been greeted with blue-skies optimism, defined by an unflagging belief that each new technological advance, whether more powerful personal computers, faster internet, smarter cellphones, or more personalized social media, would only enhance our lives.

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But public sentiment has curdled in recent years with revelations about Silicon Valley firms and online retailers collecting and sharing people’s data, social media gamed by bad actors spreading false information or sowing discord, and corporate algorithms using opaque metrics that favor some groups over others. These concerns multiply as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning technologies, which made possible many of these advances, quietly begin to nudge aside humans, assuming greater roles in running our economy, transportation, defense, medical care, and personal lives.

“Individuality … is increasingly under siege in an era of big data and machine learning,” says Mathias Risse, Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Administration and director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. The center invites scholars and leaders in the private and nonprofit sectors on ethics and AI to engage with students as part of its growing focus on the ways technology is reshaping the future of human rights.

Building more thoughtful systems

Even before the technology field belatedly began to respond to market and government pressures with promises to do better, it had become clear to Barbara Grosz , Higgins Research Professor of Natural Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), that the surest way to get the industry to act more responsibly is to prepare the next generation of tech leaders and workers to think more ethically about the work they’ll be doing. The result is Embedded EthiCS , a groundbreaking novel program that marries the disciplines of computer science and philosophy in an attempt to create change from within.

The timing seems on target, since the revolutionary technologies of AI and machine learning have begun making inroads in an ever-broadening range of domains and professions. In medicine, for instance, systems are expected soon to work effectively with physicians to provide better healthcare. In business, tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been using smart technologies for years, but use of AI is rapidly spreading, with global corporate spending on software and platforms expected to reach $110 billion by 2024.

“A one-off course on ethics for computer scientists would not work. We needed a new pedagogical model.”

— Alison Simmons, the Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

So where are we now on these issues, and what does that mean? To answer those questions, this Gazette series will examine emerging technologies in medicine and business, with the help of various experts in the Harvard community. We’ll also take a look at how the humanities can help inform the future coordination of human values and AI efficiencies through University efforts such as the AI+Art project at metaLAB(at)Harvard and Embedded EthiCS.

In spring 2017, Grosz recruited Alison Simmons , the Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy, and together they founded Embedded EthiCS . The idea is to weave philosophical concepts and ways of thinking into existing computer science courses so that students learn to ask not simply “Can I build it?” but rather “Should I build it, and if so, how?”

Through Embedded EthiCS, students learn to identify and think through ethical issues, explain their reasoning for taking, or not taking, a specific action, and ideally design more thoughtful systems that reflect basic human values. The program is the first of its kind nationally and is seen as a model for a number of other colleges and universities that plan to adapt it, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University.

In recent years, computer science has become the second most popular concentration at Harvard College, after economics. About 2,750 students have enrolled in Embedded EthiCS courses since it began. More than 30 courses, including all classes in the computer science department, participated in the program in spring 2019.

Students learn to ask not simply “Can I build it?” but rather “Should I build it, and if so, how?”

“We don’t need all courses, what we need is for enough students to learn to use ethical thinking during design to make a difference in the world and to start changing the way computing technology company leaders, systems designers, and programmers think about what they’re doing,” said Grosz.

It became clear that Harvard’s computer science students wanted and needed something more just a few years ago, when Grosz taught “Intelligent Systems: Design and Ethical Challenges,” one of only two CS courses that had integrated ethics into the syllabus at the time.

During a class discussion about Facebook’s infamous 2014 experiment covertly engineering news feeds to gauge how users’ emotions were affected, students were outraged by what they viewed as the company’s improper psychological manipulation. But just two days later, in a class activity in which students were designing a recommender system for a fictional clothing manufacturer, Grosz asked what information they thought they’d need to collect from hypothetical customers.

“It was astonishing,” she said. “How many of the groups talked about the ethical implications of the information they were collecting? None.”

When she taught the course again, only one student said she thought about the ethical implications, but felt that “it didn’t seem relevant,” Grosz recalled.

“You need to think about what information you’re collecting when you’re designing what you’re going to collect, not collect everything and then say ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have this information,’” she explained.

Making it stick

Seeing how quickly even students concerned about ethics forgot to consider them when absorbed in a technical project prompted Grosz to focus on how to help students keep ethics up front. Some empirical work shows that standalone courses aren’t very sticky with engineers, and she was also concerned that a single ethics course would not satisfy growing student interest. Grosz and Simmons designed the program to intertwine the ethical with the technical, thus helping students better understand the relevance of ethics to their everyday work.

In a broad range of Harvard CS courses now, philosophy Ph.D. students and postdocs lead modules on ethical matters tailored to the technical concepts being taught in the class.

“We want the ethical issues to arise organically out of the technical problems that they’re working on in class,’” said Simmons. “We want our students to recognize that technical and ethical challenges need to be addressed hand in hand. So a one-off course on ethics for computer scientists would not work. We needed a new pedagogical model.”

Examples of ethical problems courses are tackling

Image gallery

Are software developers morally obligated to design for inclusion?

Should social media companies suppress the spread of fake news on their platforms?

Should search engines be transparent about how they rank results?

Should we think about electronic privacy as a right?

Getting comfortable with a humanities-driven approach to learning, using the ideas and tools of moral and political philosophy, has been an adjustment for the computer-science instructors as well as students, said David Grant, who taught as an Embedded EthiCS postdoc in 2019 and is now assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“The skill of ethical reasoning is best learned and practiced through open and inclusive discussion with others,” Grant wrote in an email. “But extensive in-class discussion is rare in computer science courses, which makes encouraging active participation in our modules unusually challenging.”

Students are used to being presented problems for which there are solutions, program organizers say. But in philosophy, issues or dilemmas become clearer over time, as different perspectives are brought to bear. And while sometimes there can be right or wrong answers, solutions are typically thornier and require some difficult choices.

“This is extremely hard for people who are used to finding solutions that can be proved to be right,” said Grosz. “It’s fundamentally a different way of thinking about the world.”

“They have to learn to think with normative concepts like moral responsibility and legal responsibility and rights. They need to develop skills for engaging in counterfactual reasoning with those concepts while doing algorithm and systems design” said Simmons. “We in the humanities problem-solve too, but we often do it in a normative domain.”

“What we need is for enough students to learn to use ethical thinking during design to make a difference in the world.”

— Barbara Grosz, Higgins Research Professor of Natural Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

The importance of teaching students to consider societal implications of computing systems was not evident in the field’s early days, when there were only a very small number of computer scientists, systems were used largely in closed scientific or industry settings, and there were few “adversarial attacks” by people aiming to exploit system weaknesses, said Grosz, a pioneer in the field. Fears about misuse were minimal because so few had access.

But as the technologies have become ubiquitous in the past 10 to 15 years, with more and more people worldwide connecting via smartphones, the internet, and social networking, as well as the rapid application of machine learning and big data computing since 2012, the need for ethical training is urgent. “It’s the penetration of computing technologies throughout life and its use by almost everyone now that has enabled so much that’s caused harm lately,” said Grosz.

That apathy has contributed to the perceived disconnect between science and the public. “We now have a gap between those of us who make technology and those of us who use it,” she said.

Simmons and Grosz said that while computer science concentrators leaving Harvard and other universities for jobs in the tech sector may have the desire to change the industry, until now they haven’t been furnished with the tools to do so effectively. The program hopes to arm them with an understanding of how to identify and work through potential ethical concerns that may arise from new technology and its applications.

“What’s important is giving them the knowledge that they have the skills to make an effective, rational argument with people about what’s going on,” said Grosz, “to give them the confidence … to [say], ‘This isn’t right — and here’s why.’”

“It is exciting. It’s an opportunity to make use of our skills in a way that might have a visible effect in the near- or midterm.”

— Jeffrey Behrends, co-director of Embedded EthiCS

A winner of the Responsible CS Challenge in 2019, the program received a $150,000 grant for its work in technology education that helps fund two computer science postdoc positions to collaborate with the philosophy student-teachers in developing the different course modules.

Though still young, the program has also had some nice side effects, with faculty and graduate students in the two typically distant cohorts learning in unusual ways from each other. And for the philosophy students there’s been an unexpected boon: working on ethical questions at technology’s cutting edge. It has changed the course of their research and opened up new career options in the growing field of engaged ethics.

More like this

Embedding ethics in computer science curriculum

Embedded EthiCS wins $150,000 grant

“It is exciting. It’s an opportunity to make use of our skills in a way that might have a visible effect in the near- or midterm,” said philosophy lecturer Jeffrey Behrends , one of the program’s co-directors.

Will this ethical training reshape the way students approach technology once they leave Harvard and join the workforce? That’s the critical question to which the program’s directors are now turning their attention. There isn’t enough data to know yet, and the key components for such an analysis, like tracking down students after they’ve graduated to measure the program’s impact on their work, present a “very difficult evaluation problem” for researchers, said Behrends, who is investigating how best to measure long-term effectiveness.

Ultimately, whether stocking the field with designers, technicians, executives, investors, and policymakers will bring about a more responsible and ethical era of technology remains to be seen. But leaving the industry to self-police or wait for market forces to guide reforms clearly hasn’t worked so far.

“Somebody has to figure out a different incentive mechanism. That’s where really the danger still lies,” said Grosz of the industry’s intense profit focus. “We can try to educate students to do differently, but in the end, if there isn’t a different incentive mechanism, it’s quite hard to change Silicon Valley practice.”

Next: Ethical concerns rise as AI takes an ever larger decision-making role in many industries.

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The Defining Characteristics of Ethics Papers on Social Media Research: A Systematic Review of the Literature

• Published: 06 November 2023
• Volume 22 , pages 163–189, ( 2024 )

Cite this article

• Md. Sayeed Al-Zaman   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1433-7387 1 ,
• Ayushi Khemka   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1610-3074 2 ,
• Andy Zhang   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0007-9924-9365 3 &
• Geoffrey Rockwell   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7430-4742 4  

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The growing significance of social media in research demands new ethical standards and practices. Although a substantial body of literature on social media ethics exists, studies on the ethics of conducting research using social media are scarce. The emergence of new evidence sources, like social media, requires innovative methods and renewed consideration of research ethics. Therefore, we pose the following question: What are the defining characteristics of ethics papers on social media research? Following a modified version of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol, we analyzed 34 publications based on ten variables: author gender, publication year, region, academic discipline, type, design, methodology, social media platform in focus, positionality statement, and ethical issues. Our findings suggest contemporary social media research ethics primarily reflects the ethical ideals of the Global North, with limited representation from the Global South. Women authors have published more papers than men authors. Previous studies have prioritized ethical concerns such as privacy, informed consent, and anonymity while overlooking researchers’ risks and the ethics of social media sites. We particularly emphasized the lack of researchers’ positionality statements in research. Our findings will pave the way to understanding social media ethics better, especially with the rapid growth of social media research in global scholarship.

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Introduction

This paper systematically reviews the literature on social media research ethics. Denyer and Tranfield ( 2009 ) defined a systematic literature review (SLR) as a methodology that “locates existing studies, selects and evaluates contributions, analyses and synthesizes data, and reports on the evidence in such a way that allows reasonably clear conclusions to be reached about what is known and what is not known” (p. 671).

Many SLRs study different aspects of social media, such as social media marketing (Denyer & Tranfield, 2006 ), psychology of social media use (Zheng & Ling, 2021 ), social media hatred (Matamoros-Fernández & Farkas, 2021 ), and social media use (Tang et al., 2021 ). The growing body of social media literature suggests increasing scholarly interest worldwide in social media data’s convenience and importance.

Social media research differs from traditional research in several ways. Unlike physical research settings, social media exists in the virtual, intangible cyberspace. Also, social media users are prosumers —producers and consumers—of their content. Moreover, social media data is born-digital data that can be analyzed computationally. Large amounts of data, often called big data, can be scraped, stored, and used efficiently for digital research. As research environments transform from traditional to digital, scholars must also transform and rethink research ethics. However, inclusive and detailed ethics guideline for only social media research is scarce. For this reason, we systematically studied previous publications on social media research ethics. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocol (PRISMA-P) 2020, we address the following questions:

RQ: What are the characteristics of ethics-related papers on social media research?

RQa: Who publishes, from where and when, on the ethics of social media research?

RQb: What are the main disciplinary categories, types, designs, methods, and platforms?

RQc: What are the positionality statements and ethical issues they discussed?

Our analysis suggests that contemporary social media research ethics represents those of the Global North, leaving the Global South out. We also found that some ethical issues, including positionality, are less discussed and practiced in previous studies. In the next section, we provide some background for our study.

Social Media

Social media has been defined differently across disciplines, including communication and media studies, information science, public relations, and business studies, making its understanding complex (Carr & Hayes, 2015 ). Some papers broadly conceived the idea of social media, mentioning various websites and applications (Aichner & Jacob, 2015 ). At the same time, other works defined it more narrowly, referring to only selected platforms and apps (e.g., social networking sites (SNSs)) as social media (Boyd, 2008 ; Boyd & Ellison, 2007 ; Fuchs, 2014 ).

In their studies, Boyd ( 2008 ) and Boyd and Ellison ( 2007 ) focused on SNSs as the representatives of social media, emphasizing networking and sharing. From these contending views of social media, we can observe some of its defining features: digital technologies and computer-mediated communication; interactivity, sharing, and networking among the users; user-generated content; directionality; and modes of interaction (Carr & Hayes, 2015 ).

Ethics of Social Media Research

At first glance, foundational research ethics texts, like the Belmont Report (NCPHSBBR, 1978 ) and the Declaration of Helsinki (WMA, 1964 ), seem relevant to social media research. Both texts champion ideas of privacy, justice, anonymity, and informed consent, ideas essential to any research.

However, the principles and ethical standards discussed in both reports pose at least three problems regarding social media research. First, humans are the main concern for these ethical standards in medical research. In contrast, humanities research is more likely to incorporate social artifacts than human subjects compared to medical research. Social artifacts are the social-cultural elements humans produce, including communication materials such as books, films, newspapers, and social media content. Taking these into account, we believe that social media content, being publicly available and created voluntarily by users before the study, is free from ethical restraints (Mancosu & Vegetti, 2020 ).

Second, the idea of informed consent stated in the Belmont Report and other successive research ethics guidelines faces a struggle in the age of big data research. Big data research has become responsible for the gradual erosion of informed consent, producing challenges and dilemmas for researchers, participants, and regulators (Andreotta et al., 2021 ; Favaretto et al., 2020 ; Franzke et al., 2020 ). Previous studies from various disciplines also acknowledged and explicated the ethics problem in social media and big data research (Andreotta et al., 2021 ; Chen & Quan-Haase, 2020 ; Favaretto et al., 2020 ; Ferretti et al., 2020 ; Hibbin et al., 2018 ). While researchers think informed consent should be a priority in research, social media and big data research ethics may not be built on and judged by this parameter. Hence, they exempt themselves from ethics restrictions (Favaretto et al., 2020 ). While the discussed guidelines and studies outline the informed consent relating to research ethics, some other national and supranational guidelines, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), include similar ideas but are unrelated to research ethics.

Third, there is a critical lack of positionality statements in previous research (Matamoros-Fernández & Farkas, 2021 ). Positionality identifies the position from which one views and understands the world. More specifically, positionality defines the standpoints of the researchers from which they observe the social reality and the relationships they maintain with social factors and phenomena. Put another way, researchers’ positionality refers to their stances “in relation to the social and political context of the study—the community, the organization or the participant group” (Coghlan & Brydon-Miller, 2014 , p. 1).

Positionality is an integral part of a critical research process. The researchers are a part of the framework, and their ideologies, beliefs, and worldviews influence the process (Jafar, 2018 ). Sometimes positionality is confused with bias . Although little attention has been paid so far in the methodological literature to understanding bias (Hammersley & Gomm, 1997 ), we can define it as prejudice, a harmful and negative proclivity in research. Bias leads to distorted outcomes in research by deliberately hiding a position, whereas positionality is meaningful for research as it attempts to be honest about how our research is shaped through interpretation and representation (Hammersley & Gomm, 1997 ; Jafar, 2018 ). While bias undermines research, positionality identifies its boundaries.

Materials and Method

Literature search, prisma protocol.

This paper systematically reviews the literature on social media research ethics. For this review process, we adapted the PRISMA protocol (Page et al., 2021 ). This protocol, including a 27-item checklist, was first developed in 2015, intending “to facilitate the preparation and reporting of a robust protocol for the systematic review” (Moher et al., 2016 , p. 148). Subsequent publications expanded it to aid mainly life science researchers (Page et al., 2021 ; Shamseer et al., 2015 ). As the present SLR is primarily rooted in humanities and social sciences, we had to modify PRISMA to fit our study. In this process, we reduced some criteria from the checklist that are only relevant to life sciences, such as protocol and registration for health or animal research.

Eligibility Criteria and Data Source

We set a few exclusion and inclusion criteria aligned with our research objectives. First, we sought to analyze publications that dealt with only social media research ethics. Second, we had no gender, regional, disciplinary, publication type, design, and methodological preferences. Third, we set our language preferences only to English. English is the dominant language in today’s academic world and most scholarly outlets and outputs are in English. Again, in our pilot observation, we found little evidence of relevant papers in other languages in our selected databases. Finally, we set our time range from 2004 to 2022, as the most popular social media sites started after 2004. Primarily, we used the Scopus database, which contains 36,377 journals and 11,678 publishers worldwide (Tang et al., 2021 , p. 3), along with the Web of Science database to increase the robustness of our literature search (Laato et al., 2022 ). Both databases are considered the two most comprehensive databases containing mostly high-quality journals and what other researchers are likely to use (Laato et al., 2022 ; Tang et al., 2021 ). While the JSTOR database includes social sciences and humanities literature, we found no exclusive and relevant literature. We conducted our literature search in March 2022.

Search Strategy

For the search, we used the following combination of keywords to search publication titles only: “social media” OR “Facebook” OR “YouTube” OR “WhatsApp” OR “Instagram” OR “WeChat” OR “TikTok” OR “Douyin” OR “QQ” OR “Sina Weibo” OR “Kuaishou” OR “Snapchat” OR “Telegram” OR “Twitter” OR “Reddit” AND “research” AND “ethics.” We determined and built this combination of keywords based on our research question. First, the three major concerns of our review are social media, research, and ethics, making them keywords. Second, we selected the top 14 social media platforms based on their popularity: Facebook (2,910 million [M]), YouTube (2,562 M), WhatsApp (2,000 M), Instagram (1,478 M), WeChat (1,263 M), TikTok (1,000), Douyin (600 M), QQ (574 M), Sina Weibo (573 M), Kuaishou (573 M), Snapchat (557 M), Telegram (550 M), Twitter (436 M), Reddit (430 M) (Statista, 2022 ). In this regard, we embraced a more constricted definition of social media limited to SNSs (Boyd, 2008 ; Boyd & Ellison, 2007 ; Carr & Hayes, 2015 ; Fuchs, 2014 ). Our search keywords seem more comprehensive than similar previous studies that used fewer keywords and social media platforms in their literature search (e.g., Staccini & Lau, 2020 ).

Our search yielded 64 publications: 33 from Scopus and 31 from Web of Science (Fig.  1 ). We compiled these records and their metadata in a single Microsoft Excel file. Afterward, we cleaned these records in four steps based on our initial eligibility criteria. Our final sample included 34 publications.

Flow diagram of this SLR. It was borrowed from Page et al. ( 2021 , p. 5) and modified

Data Analysis

We analyzed the selected publications based on ten predetermined criteria: author’s region, gender, year of publication, discipline, type, design, method, platform focus, positionality statement, and ethical issue. In Table 1 , we described our variables, providing relevant explanations and examples where necessary. We sometimes relied on previous similar reviews for variable selection. For example, Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas ( 2021 ) included location, platform, method, and positionality in their review paper.

Coding and Analysis

We conducted a content analysis containing both quantitative and qualitative insights. We utilized meta-analysis to summarize the data of all variables statistically. Meta-analysis is the statistical analysis of variables of the relevant literature to draw general conclusions (Hedges, 1992 ). For most variables, such as disciplinary category, type, and platform, we relied on inductive coding, a bottom-to-top approach to data analysis. In this technique, coders closely interact with data instead of relying on predefined categories, iteratively read the raw data, and generate codes or extract information (Allen, 2017 ).

At the same time, we deductively coded other variables, including design and gender, meaning we set our categories before information extraction from the publications and then deduced the assigned code. Two authors of this paper coded the data separately and cross-checked each record to maintain the intercoder reliability of the information. After a few discussion sessions, we resolved our disagreements based on mutual consent (O’Connor & Joffe, 2020 ), thus achieving Cohen’s Kappa, κ = 1. Table 2 presents the summaries of the selected papers for this study based on our selected variables.

Publication Year

Despite our time range for publications starting from 2004, the first paper meeting our criteria was published in 2009. The publications seem unequally distributed throughout the period, maintaining no identifiable pattern, and with visible fluctuations. For example, no relevant papers were published in 2011, 2012, 2015, and 2021, and the highest number of papers were published in 2018 and 2020 (20.59%) (Fig.  2 ). Publications increased continuously only between 2015 and 2018 without any decline. A tiny spark in 2022 might be interpreted as a growing interest in social media research ethics, but the previous year (i.e., 2021) lacked any literature. Although the trendline suggests an upward tendency, we cannot confidently predict the future of the publications based on our sample size.

Yearly distributions of the publications

In our analysis, women authors (64.08%) seem to be more productive in this field than men authors (34.95%) (Table 3 ). Only 0.97% of authors we identified as non-binary (Warfield et al., 2019 ). Of the 34 papers, 18 were co-authored by at least one woman and man (e.g., Al Zou’bi et al., 2020 ; Fiesler & Proferes, 2018 ; Golder et al., 2017 ), more than half of the total publications. Ten papers were written by only women authors (e.g., Hibbin et al., 2018 ; Nenadic, 2018 ; Sellers et al., 2020 ), and six were written by only men authors (e.g., Costello et al., 2019 ; Fuchs, 2018 ; Zimmer & Proferes, 2014 ).

Region and Country

From a regional perspective, studies on social media research ethics are primarily from North America ( n  = 16; 44.44%), followed by Europe ( n  = 14; 38.89%) and Oceania ( n  = 4; 11.11%) (Table 4 ). Country-wise, the USA produced the highest number of papers, accounting for 36.84% ( n  = 14) of all publications (Table 5 ). The UK has the second-highest publications share ( n  = 7; 18.42%), followed by Canada and Australia ( n  = 4; 10.53%). While 94.44% ( n  = 32) of the papers are from the Western world, only 5.56% ( n  = 2) are from the rest of the world, indicating a massive intellectual underrepresentation of non-Western countries. Of the two papers with non-Western authors, one was from China (all the authors were Chinese (Chen et al., 2022 ). However, another paper was a collaboration between authors from Jordan and the USA (Al Zou’bi et al., 2020 ). This finding further explicates the limited contributions of non-Western authors, suggesting the dominance of Western authors.

Discipline and Type

Of the four disciplinary categories we identified, most of the publications are from the social sciences ( n  = 22; 43.14%), followed by the life sciences ( n  = 15; 29.41%) (Table 6 ). The arts and humanities ( n  = 5; 9.80%) occupy the bottom of this list, suggesting a lack of scholarship regarding the ethics of social media research in these fields. It is important to mention that some publications are interdisciplinary. For example, studies by Hokke et al. ( 2020 ), Al Zou’bi et al. ( 2020 ), Samuel et al. ( 2018 ), Parsons ( 2019 ), and Hibbin et al. ( 2018 ) covered both life and social sciences. Similarly, some studies, including Zimmer and Proferes ( 2014 ), Fiesler and Proferes ( 2018 ), and Zimmer ( 2010 ), connected computer and social sciences.

We found seven types of publications, with review articles ( n  = 11; 32.35%) being the most common, followed by research articles ( n  = 9; 26.47%) (Table 7 ). Most review articles are narrative reviews, while some are systematic reviews. Other publications are book chapters, conference papers, opinion articles, reports, and editorials: altogether, they comprise 41.17% ( n  = 16) of the total publications.

Design, Method and Platform

More than half of the publications are qualitative ( n  = 19; 55.88%), suggesting the dominance of this sort of research design, while publications with quantitative design ( n  = 8; 23.53%) are less than half the number of qualitative publications (Table 8 ). Interestingly, research designs of 23.53% ( n  = 6) of the publications could not be identified as they are either editorials, reports, or opinion articles. Only 2.94% ( n  = 1) adopted a mixed methods design.

Narrative review ( n  = 9; 25%) secures the top position as a method, while 22.22% of publications did not define any method. As mentioned, these were mostly review articles, opinion articles, and editorials (Table 9 ). Interviews ( n  = 7; 19.44%) were popular as a qualitative method among researchers, occupying the third position in the list.

Literature on social media ethics mainly deals with seven social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Sino Weibo (Table 10 ). Most papers discussed Facebook ( n  = 18; 33.96%), followed by Twitter ( n  = 16; 30.19%). Eight papers (15.09%) did not focus on any specific platform.

Ethical Issues and Positionality

We found 13 broad ethical issues the papers discussed with varying importance (Table 12 ). Privacy ( n  = 29; 24.37%) and informed consent ( n  = 25; 21.01%) received the most attention. Only one paper did not discuss any specific ethical issues. Only two papers (5.88%) included a positionality statement (Costello et al., 2019 ; Luka & Millette, 2018 ). One paper discussed the importance of positionality in the research ethics (Costello et al., 2019 ) (Table 11 ), indicating a lack of interest in positionality as an ethical issue.

Discussion and Conclusion

The present SLR followed the PRISMA guideline to review 34 relevant publications on social media research ethics from 2009 to 2022. The objective was to address a broad research question based on ten selected variables.

Our analysis of the authors’ gender revealed that women publish 29.13% more papers on social media research ethics than men. Previous studies examining gender gaps in academic publishing, which are discipline-specific, do not provide any insights into ethics or social media. For instance, Mayer and Rathmann ( 2018 ) reviewed various studies that used different methods, variables, fields, databases, or countries to observe gender gaps in academic publishing. Most results indicate that women publish fewer papers than men. Teele and Thelen ( 2017 ) studied the top ten political science journals and similarly found that women are underrepresented. Schucan Bird ( 2011 ) investigated the research productivity of UK-based social scientists and their gendered proportion in their respective fields. Once again, the results show that women publish fewer journal articles than men. In this regard, the findings of Mayer and Rathmann ( 2018 ) are significant. They studied the research outputs of German psychology professors and found that in addition to the gender gap, it is essential to consider women’s different publication patterns. For example, women are more interested in publishing potentially less prestigious book chapters than articles in competitive journals. Therefore, our study offers novel insights for future research.

As mentioned, most of the publications originated in the Global North. This poses at least two problems. First, Western ethics dominates ethical understandings of social media research, excluding non-Western scholars’ ethical positions. As ethics is culturally relative, Western ethical practices should not be considered universal and the only way to think through ethics. For example, research including human participants (e.g., survey- and interview-based studies) are sometimes published in academic journals in the Global South without ethics approval. By contrast, research conducted in most Western universities require authorization from an IRB before publication if they involve human participants. Similarly, fundamental ethical practices like data privacy and informed consent vary across geographic locations. Therefore, there needs to be a greater diversity of ethical ideas and discussion across cultures if we are to standardize ethical guidelines for social media research confidently. Second, the dominance of Western knowledge related to research ethics reproduces and reinforces the hegemony of Western thought on the subject. This impedes the inclusive democratization of knowledge, which suggests the importance of paying attention to the politics of citation. The discussion is inevitably poorer and limited by Western ethical frameworks and their particular assumptions, histories, and vocabulary. What might other voices of ethics teach?

We found the highest share of publications from the social sciences. Of note, 17 out of 22 papers from social sciences are interdisciplinary, suggesting the multidisciplinary nature of social media research ethics. Arts and humanities remain at the bottom of the list, which suggests a lack of interest in social media research ethics among their researchers. Humanists may be less likely to use contemporary social media as evidence. Many humanists focus on past evidence for which an ethics review is not always necessary. It could also be that the number of humanists working and publishing in research ethics is lower than from the other disciplinary categories.

The higher prevalence of issues surrounding privacy, informed consent, anonymity, and justice in the ethics publications reviewed underscores the enduring relevance of traditional Western research ethics, as anchored in the Belmont Report and the Helsinki Declaration. These ethical concerns are multifaceted, often overlapping with one another. For instance, the concept of privacy encompasses various dimensions, including data privacy, which pertains to information types, collection procedures, utilization, and protection (Nicholas et al., 2020 ). Additionally, information philosophers propose four types of privacy: physical, mental, decisional, and informational (Kisselburgh & Beever, 2022 ). Despite scholarly efforts, framing privacy in the context of digital age research remains challenging due to its dynamic nature, leading to ongoing debates among researchers and leaving ethical dilemmas unresolved.

In relation to privacy, the notion of informed consent has become a subject of debate in the era of big (digital) data research. While some researchers adhere to traditional viewpoints that all data producers must be informed about the use of their data, many are grappling with the evolving nature of research practices and ethics, sometimes setting aside the requirement for informed consent when dealing with large public datasets. Questions arise as to the feasibility of securing informed consent from millions of unknown Twitter users when their data is used for large-scale analysis (Fiesler & Proferes, 2018 ). This raises broader scholarly debates regarding privacy and informed consent, which invariably extend to considerations of anonymity and other ethical concerns. Do researchers need to anonymize such data? Is there a confidentiality issue with this type of data? Some researchers tend to address these questions independently (Luka & Millette, 2018 ; Mancosu & Vegetti, 2020 ), while organizational efforts have been observed in providing guidelines for ethical practices (Franzke et al., 2020 ).

This discussion highlights the intricacies and ongoing debates surrounding privacy, informed consent, anonymity, and other ethical concerns within contemporary research ethics, underscoring the complex nature of ethical decision-making in the digital age. However, apart from the widely discussed ethical concerns, we endorse three important, less-discussed ethical concerns: (a) researchers’ risk, (b) the ethics of social media platforms, and (c) positionality.

Researcher’s Risk

First, despite researchers’ presence in social media research, discussions about researchers’ risk and safety are rare, calling for further scholarly attention. We experienced the risks of studying contemporary phenomena while working on a research project with social media data from the Gamergate community that has harassed academics in the past (Chess & Shaw, 2015 ; Rockwell & Suomela, 2015 ). There are various risks associated with social media research, beyond unwanted attention, such as exposure to toxicity while collecting and analyzing data that may harm researchers’ mental health. Unfortunately, only two papers discussed this topic and not in great detail (Al Zou’bi et al., 2020 ; Johnson et al., 2018 ).

Ethics of Social Media Platforms

Second, only one paper (Golder et al., 2017 ) discussed social media companies’ ethical responsibilities. Different social media platforms have different terms of services, data management and sharing, site administration, and legal issues. For example, some platforms have open data that can be easily accessed through interfaces (e.g., Twitter), while others limit the amount of harvestable data (e.g., Telegram). As research is a form of engagement, we need to take into account the platforms’ position and, in some cases, adapt our own positions. This is essential now with large-scale research datasets like LAION 5B ( https://laion.ai/ ) being used to train AIs that may then be used by researchers.

• Positionality

Third and foremost, positionality should be an integral part of ethics research. The researcher is the only person involved in the research process from beginning to end. Therefore, to evaluate the research outcome, or in these cases, the research ethics positions taken, it is important to know who the researcher is and how they affect the resulting perspectives. Acknowledging positionality is becoming an ethical and ideal practice in the research (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020 ). For these reasons, we encourage researchers to include a positionality statement of how their identities, experiences, and beliefs might affect the outcomes. No one expects these statements to be exhaustive, but openness aids ethical discussion, making research more engaging and less dominating. Assessing predispositions and standpoints prior to research informs scholars how they themselves might affect the study and adjust parameters accordingly.

Positionality may also be identified by analyzing the researcher’s relation to the topic under investigation, the research participants or data, and the research context and process (A. G. D. Holmes, 2020 ). Previous studies from various disciplines, such as media and communication studies (Deuze, 2021 ), health and medicine (Jafar, 2018 ), political science (Mason-Bish, 2019 ), social science, anthropological studies (C. E. Holmes, 2021 ; Shaw et al., 2020 ), and digital research (Ricker, 2017 ), emphasized and acknowledged researcher’s positionality. Positionality is essential when working with marginalized and vulnerable communities (Shaw et al., 2020 ).

Studies, including Cuthill ( 2015 ), Mason-Bish ( 2019 ), and Shaw et al. ( 2020 ), implied qualitative studies are more likely to include positionality statements. While most of our selected papers followed a qualitative design, we found researchers tended to avoid positionality statements. Only two papers in our sample included positionality statements: one was qualitative (Luka & Millette, 2018 ), while another was quantitative (Costello et al., 2019 ). Positionality statements may not have any relation to the research design. We suggest that researchers state their positions irrespective of their design.

We believe these results will pave the way to understanding social media ethics better, especially with the rapid growth of social media research in global scholarship. This study endeavors to bridge this gap with novel findings. We are also optimistic this study will assist both new and experienced researchers in rethinking ethical social media research. In the next section, we discuss some of the limitations of this research, followed by a discussion of future research directions.

Limitations and Future Research

This research has limitations. First, we used the PRISMA protocol for this paper. It is primarily used in computer and life sciences. The 27-point checklist includes some checks unrelated to the social sciences and humanities. Also, no standard PRISMA protocol exists for other disciplinary categories beyond computer and life sciences. For these reasons, we had to modify the protocol to fit our study.

Second, our research may lack inclusiveness. The publications in our study are from only two databases, and as such, we do not explore others like Google Scholar or EBSCOhost. Though we believe quality over quantity is essential in this sort of research, we recommend that future studies incorporate additional databases. We also excluded non-English publications. As discussed above, we need to engage with different research ethics cultures and their concomitant preferred publishing languages for future studies.

Third, we faced an issue while coding the gender variable. As stated earlier, we noted the gender identity of the authors from their pronoun usage (they/them, she/her, and he/him), extracting this information from the publicly available information about the authors, such as bios and interviews. We acknowledge this method’s limitations in equating gender with pronoun usage, thereby simplifying the complex and layered nature of gender. The pronoun usage is thus an indicative marker rather than a determining one.

Finally, we acknowledge our positionality. We are a research group with diverse backgrounds. Being university-educated brown and white researchers, we acknowledge our epistemic privilege in having our institution situated in the Global North. These intersecting categories and perspectives affect our research process at every step, latently and explicitly. We strived to be mindful of the differences within our group and practice ethics of care to hold space for the diverse experiences that we bring to our group and situate our knowledge production in a robust and nuanced lived academic reality.

By conducting this research, we also observed that researchers might be interested in contributing to some research gaps in this area. Therefore, we conclude by proposing some directions for future research. We found that most papers on social media research ethics come from the Global North. Although our language selection may have contributed to this result, we still wonder if there is any politics of knowledge in this area. Therefore, future research further empirically and more inclusively investigates this phenomenon: What sources and publications do other researchers cite, what countries collaborate more than others, and what institutions dominate others in research outputs? Investigating the factors behind the production disparity between the Global North and the Global South would also be interesting. Studies have already suggested that knowledge diffusion and publication bias favor high-income countries and more prestigious institutions, underrepresenting low-income countries and less prestigious institutions (Skopec et al., 2020 ). We also suspect a similar tendency in publishing on social media research ethics. Finally, we believe all would benefit from cross-cultural research into how research ethics are discussed and practiced in other communities.

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Al-Zaman, M.S., Khemka, A., Zhang, A. et al. The Defining Characteristics of Ethics Papers on Social Media Research: A Systematic Review of the Literature. J Acad Ethics 22 , 163–189 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-023-09491-7

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Essay on Media Ethics and Principles of Media Companies

Essay on media ethics: introduction, essay on media ethics: literal explanation, essay on media ethics: implied meaning, essay on media ethics: conclusion, works cited.

Media ethics deals with the ethical standards, practices, and principles of media companies. Some of the media include film, art, theatre, broadcast, and the internet. There are different ethical considerations that should be taken seriously by practitioners, journalists, and analysts. This explains why different corporations and corporations attempt to control and manipulate the media.

Governments can rely on censorship to monitor the media. As well, business corporations can monitor the media through ownership. This discussion concentrates on the literal explanation of the topic and its implied meaning.

The success of any media company is determined by the quality of their information and news. This explains why media ethics is a relevant subject today. The media is a field that deals with the best standards, ethics, and principles for better practice (Patterson 72).

Various media companies should consider the need for the best ethical practices. This would become the best way towards successful societies. Some of the areas covered under media ethics include ethics of entertainment, journalism, and democracy. There are various regulations that ensure media companies act ethically and professionally.

To begin with, media houses such as print and broadcast media should always uphold the best ethical practices. The issue of “news manipulation” is evident also today (Kieran 38). From this understanding, it becomes clear that the government should be on the frontline to manipulate the media.

By so doing, the people will always get accurate information. Most of the news media can hide the truth and sometimes present wrong information to the audience. “Truth” is a critical issue because it tends to conflict with other ideals or values (Kieran 38). The ethics of the media becomes necessary in order to address the above issues.

Different media companies should be aware of issues that might result in negative implications. While trying to tell the truth, it becomes necessary to consider the question of “public interest”. Although some information might be very true such as confidential government information, it would be wrong to broadcast them because of public interest.

As well, the issue of privacy plays a significant role in the media. This is the case because privacy is a fundamental human privilege or right (Fawcett 39). This explains why the lives of certain persons and public figures are a major concern.

The other ethical consideration stems from the question of “taste”. The media should be ethical. This explains why journalists and other professionals in the industry should not reveal shocking images to their audiences. For instance, dead bodies or bloody scenes should be screened with caution. At times, professionals in the field tend to have conflicts with the law.

This arises from various issues such as the protection of personal or confidential information. “Sometimes journalists and other media companies decide to break the law in order to obtain their news” (Crook 63). This explains why there is need to consider the issue of media ethics today.

In the present world, the study and analysis of “global ethics” has remained a major topic of discussion. However, what comes out clearly is that there are very few morals aspects today. This explains why the media today should reconsider the best norms and ideals in order to promote the best practices (Black 49).

The issue of ethics in the media has resulted in new frameworks that help individuals identify the major challenges affecting different fields such as the newsprint media and journalism.

For very many years, the question of media ethics has been widely examined to promote best practices and information dissemination. Media companies and outlets always consider the quality of their norms and practices in order to address most of the issues affecting different cultures today.

The world is presently evolving through the wave of “digital convergence”. The situation has created a stimulating scenario that calls for new frameworks and ideals to address the issues affecting many people today (Chomsky 17).

It is agreeable that modern changes in technology continue to change the nature of the media. Although the issue of ethical standards determines the success of any media company, it is quite clear that different companies have failed to embrace the best practices.

It is evident that different reporters and undercover personnel tend to engage in wrongful media practices such as trespassing in order to obtain certain information and news (Chomsky 41). Sometimes they engage in deception and criminal activities in an attempt to get news. The current explosion of the internet and social media has changed most of the ideas linked to media ethics.

Despite the existing legal frameworks, a new kind of “information revolution” has changed people’s imaginations and memories. The world is today characterized by atrocities whereby individuals are struggling to succeed in their careers. Many people are trying to achieve their goals in a world that has become “inter-connected”.

The situation has resulted in dishonesty thus embracing unethical practices in the industry. The above explains shows clearly how the media industry continues to face new challenges. Media companies are required to address the challenges if they want to succeed and retain their audience’s trust (Chomsky 86).

The issue of “media ethics” seeks to promote the best standards in the industry. The bedrock for any ethical and successful company in the media is its standards of practice. Media companies should always embrace the concepts of fairness, transparency, openness, and accuracy.

The use of such concepts can play a significant role towards a successful and ethical practice. Companies should consider the best standards in order to overcome the issue of media bias (Richard 12).

The media is a classic example of the diseases that continue to eat away the world’s culture. It is evident that the media today plays a significant role towards a cultural breakdown. This continues to affect people’s local identities and cultural ideas. According to Ward (76), it has become impossible for different media companies to apply ethical standards in their affairs.

This has affected the integrity of the media houses. That being the case, there is need to revisit the issue of ethics in the industry. The approach will help different governments and corporations establish new ways to keep all media companies in check. This will eventually promote the best practices and ethics in the industry.

While the media plays a significant role in the society, there is need to monitor and control their practices. This is the best approach to promote ethical standards, prevent bias, and discourage any dishonest media practices. The current technological changes continue to affect the integrity of these ethical standards. It would therefore be necessary to encourage the best practices in order to promote cultural development.

Black, Jay. Doing Ethics in Media. New York: Blackwell, 2011. Print.

Chomsky, Noam. Media Control. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2005. Print.

Crook, Tim. Comparative Media Law and Ethics. New York: Longman, 2009. Print.

Fawcett, Brian. Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow. New York: Talonbooks, 1986. Print.

Kieran, Matthew. Media Ethics: A Philosophical Approach. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2001. Print.

Patterson, Philip. Media Ethics: Issues and Cases, 5th edition . McGraw-Hill, 2004. Print.

Richard, Stephen. Ethics and the Media: An Introduction. New York: Wiley, 2011. Print.

Ward, Stephen. Global Media Ethics: Problems and Perspectives. New York: Blackwell, 2013. Print.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Essay on Media Ethics and Principles of Media Companies." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/ethics-in-the-media-essay/.

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Ethical Storytelling on Social Media

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Are your social media stories aligned with your mission?

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Anita Varma is the assistant director of Social Sector Ethics, as well as Journalism & Media Ethics. Views are her own.

On social media, images and hashtags can spread like wildfire. Posts that go viral are usually those that prompt a visceral reaction from users who feel moved to reshare and, in the best cases, take action based on a post. The scale, reach, and free nature of social media make it lucrative for nonprofits on tight budgets to leverage it as a platform for soliciting donations and raising awareness through storytelling.

The (questionable) value of a “Like” or click

On social media, campaigns often “do well” from the perspective of metrics like click rates and “Likes” when they ignore ethical considerations altogether in favor of slogans, woeful poster children, and sensationalism. Much of the time, these campaigns only capture a tiny sliver of a nonprofit’s story.  At this point, it is worth asking: what is the value of clicks and “Likes” if it comes at the expense of faithfully representing the communities your nonprofit serves? Furthermore, if the answer is that these clicks and “Likes” are cheap, we should pause to consider the higher long-term (non-monetary) costs of alienating the communities a nonprofit has a mission to serve.

A common strategy for capturing attention and cutting through the noise is to use social media to tell personal stories about real people who have struggled and been helped by a nonprofit. Certainly, glimpses of people’s personal pain can fit neatly into a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter post and attract attention in the form of “Likes” and reshares, but these stories also risk reinforcing stereotypes of people receiving services from the nonprofit sector with an implied takeaway that communities served are dependent and helpless.

Partnering with communities to tell their stories

The biggest question that nonprofits need to ask themselves is who is being given a voice in social media stories, and how ? Across nonprofit and for-profit media, members of marginalized communities are often talked about , not with . And when members of marginalized communities are quoted, it is frequently for an emotionally stirring story of pain that ends with improvement thanks, in part, to a nonprofit’s services. Far less frequently do they have a chance to offer their stories in their own words and on their own terms.

Nonprofit storytelling on social media takes strides in an ethical direction whenever the people represented have a chance to provide input to shape how they are represented. If someone is uncomfortable with a portrayal, it is in the nonprofit’s best interest to give them a chance to voice this discomfort, and for the nonprofit to incorporate this feedback in revisions. Otherwise, social media “success” may come at the expense of maintaining a respectful relationship with communities served – which surely flies in the face of any reputable nonprofit’s mission.

Mythbusting: Countering reductive stereotypes

One concern about involving community members in producing social media campaigns might be that it will impose on their time and become onerous. To mitigate this concern (particularly if your nonprofit is running multiple social media campaigns in tight succession), consider using social media posts for “mythbusting.” Myths about marginalized communities are easily traced in popular media, and easy to debunk based on your insight into the issue your nonprofit seeks to solve. Acknowledging the elephant in the room is a tried and true way to address it, and helps situate your nonprofit as not only serving a community but also well-versed in why there may be resistance or suspicion from others.

A final note on the history of nonprofit appeals

As a final note, these ethical considerations for social media are not unique to digital settings. On the contrary, the history of nonprofit storytelling includes decades of appeals that range from reductive to substantive. Unlike print brochures and annual reports, however, social media posts are often posted without a lengthy editing or review process, which makes it more timely but also poses risks. As nonprofits strategize their social media presence and use, we encourage incorporating time for ethical reflection to ensure that posts are aligned with advancing your mission, above all else.

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Ethics of Social Media Research: Common Concerns and Practical Considerations

Megan a. moreno.

1 Department of Pediatrics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin.

Natalie Goniu

Peter s. moreno.

2 School of Law, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin.

Douglas Diekema

3 Treuman Katz Center for Bioethics, Seattle Children's Research Institute, Seattle, Washington.

4 Department of Pediatrics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

Social media Websites (SMWs) are increasingly popular research tools. These sites provide new opportunities for researchers, but raise new challenges for Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) that review these research protocols. As of yet, there is little-to-no guidance regarding how an IRB should review the studies involving SMWs. The purpose of this article was to review the common risks inherent in social media research and consider how researchers can consider these risks when writing research protocols. We focused this article on three common research approaches: observational research, interactive research, and survey/interview research. Concomitant with these research approaches, we gave particular attention to the issues pertinent to SMW research, including privacy, consent, and confidentiality. After considering these challenges, we outlined key considerations for both researchers and reviewers when creating or reviewing SMW IRB protocols. Our goal in this article was to provide a detailed examination of relevant ethics and regulatory issues for both researchers and those who review their protocols.

Introduction

S ocial media Websites (SMWs) provide opportunities for user participation in the creation and display of multimedia data. These popular Websites are increasingly emerging as valuable research tools. There are several aspects of SMWs that provided unique advantages to researchers. First, SMWs present innovative opportunities to examine the displayed online behaviors and beliefs in a context that is naturalistic, as it is part of the participants' daily lives. Second, SMWs allow a researcher to reach out and conduct studies within the populations that may be hard to reach in traditional research, such as underserved populations. Finally, in many cases, this research may be feasible and low cost, as it can be conducted from the researcher's office using a SMW.

SMWs present many new opportunities for research, but also raise new challenges for the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) that review these research protocols. It remains difficult to determine what risks and privacy expectations are unique to the SMW realm, and what challenges can be addressed by modifications of known and understood risks inherent in research. As of yet, there is little-to-no guidance from federal regulations or institutions, and very little existing literature, on how an IRB should review research protocols involving SMWs. 1

Given these challenges, the purpose of this article was to review the common risks inherent in social media research and discuss whether these risks represent concerns unique to social media, or modifications to our current understanding of research risks generally. We focused this article on three common research approaches: observational research, interactive research, and survey/interview research. Concomitant with these research approaches, we gave particular attention to issues regarding privacy, consent, and confidentiality. After considering these challenges, we conclude this article by providing key considerations for researchers and reviewers when creating or reviewing SMW IRB protocols. Our goal in this article was not to dictate the rules and regulations for IRBs, but rather to open discussion and outline relevant issues for both researchers and those who review their protocols. Throughout this article, we have framed our discussion around four SMWs that are currently popular: Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Studies of these SMWs illustrate both similarities and differences in social media research techniques and concomitant potential IRB concerns.

Twitter is an SMW in which profile owners (i.e., those with exclusive rights to share information from a certain account) share short textual information—limited to 140 characters, also called microblogs or tweets—with others in an ongoing, continuously updated RSS feed. Twitter studies as of yet have gathered data regarding individual patient experiences in areas such as pain and smoking cessation, as well as population-level data regarding events such as pandemics. 2 – 4 YouTube is a video-sharing site that allows the account owners to upload videos, and allows any visitor to view videos. Videos may be user-generated or professionally made. Studies to date have included evaluation of health information within the YouTube videos, 5 assessment of YouTube as a medical teaching tool, 6 and use of YouTube to evaluate an individual's behavior or even symptoms. 7 LinkedIn is a social networking site (SNS) that allows profile owners to share employment and personal information with others. This site focuses on user's professional identities. Studies to date include basic analyses of the LinkedIn users, comparing them to the Facebook users. 8

Currently, the most popular SNS is Facebook, which allows profile owners to create an online profile, including displayed personal information via text, video, surveys, or photographs, to build an online social network by friending profile owners, and to communicate with other profile owners via messaging. 9 Studies to date include evaluation of displayed content by profile owners, including health risk behavior information such as sexual behavior and substance use, mental health, and personality characteristics. 10 – 15

Common Regulatory Concerns with Social Media Research

As with all types of research, there are potential risks to participants in studies involving SMWs. We have focused on three specific research approaches that researchers and IRBs may encounter when considering federal and institutional regulations that involve SMWs: observational, interactive, and survey/interview. For each of these, we considered relevant risks and framed those risks within the context of traditional research as appropriate. Because the issues regarding privacy concerns in observational research may apply to the other two research approaches, we address the observational research first.

Observational research

A key issue in considering observational research using social media is whether the proposed project meets the criteria as human subjects research, and if so, what type of review is needed. A human subject is defined by federal regulations as a living individual about whom an investigator obtains data through interaction with the individual or identifiable private information. If the following conditions are met, access to the SMW is public; information is identifiable, but not private; and information gathering requires no interaction with the person who posted it online, and then presumably the proposed project does not constitute the human subjects research. For example, an observational study of YouTube videos involves publicly posted and available content accessible to any Internet user. In this case, the information is not private, and it does not require any interaction with the subject to access it.

Observational research may also meet the criteria for exemption from the IRB review if the study involves observation of public information regarding individual human subjects. Exempt research includes research involving the observation of public behavior, except when information obtained is (a) recorded in such a manner that subjects can be identified either directly or through the identifiers linked to the subjects, or (b) any disclosure of subjects' responses outside the published research that could reasonably place the subjects at risk of criminal or civic liability, or be damaging to the subjects' financial standing, employability, or reputation. This category of research would likely apply to an investigator observing Websites such as Facebook or LinkedIn, provided that only publicly available profiles were evaluated to make collective observations. It is important to note that this category does not apply to minors if the investigator participates in the activities being observed. Thus, as long as one does not participate by interacting with participants, such as trying to establish connections between profiles via friending, this would seemingly apply to minors' displayed content on SMWs.

Recent changes in the SMW policies and controversies related to particular studies have raised new issues regarding whether observation of the public behavior via SMWs should continue to receive the IRB approval. 16 At one state university, the IRB's review and interpretation of the Facebook Rights and Responsibilities statement led to controversy over whether an SMW-based study could be approved. At the time of this article, this Facebook policy stated “If you collect information from users, you will: obtain their consent, make it clear you (and not Facebook) are the one collecting their information, and post a privacy policy explaining what information you collect and how you will use it.” This debate regarding privacy concerns in observational research, and SMW research generally, involves three major topics: user involvement in privacy protection, Website privacy guidelines, and legal considerations.

User involvement in privacy settings and Website access

Some SMWs allow the users to choose their own privacy settings. On Facebook and LinkedIn, for example, profile owners have the choice to protect their displayed information through profile security settings. 17 , 18 Profile security settings can be private (i.e., limiting some or all profile information access to online friends approved by the profile owner), or public (i.e., allowing any user access to the profile). Privacy settings can limit access to the profile as a whole, or settings can be customized to limit access to certain profile viewers or to particular sections of the profile. Similar settings are available on Twitter. Thus, participants can choose whether or not their posted content is publicly available, which may in turn affect whether an IRB views the observation of this content as an exempt or otherwise permissible research.

In the past, some IRBs have considered whether or not the Website itself requires a username and password login to determine if the site is of a public or private nature. If a username and password were required, the site was not considered public, and thus the consent could be required to view content. Newer SMWs raise concerns about whether that policy can still guide these decisions, because many SMWs require usernames and passwords for only particular purposes or only under certain circumstances. YouTube, for example, requires a username and password to verify one is over the age of 18 to post videos and view videos of adult content. Anyone may view general YouTube videos, with or without a username or password. One would therefore not expect that the consent would be required to conduct an observational study of general YouTube videos. Other SMWs such as Facebook require a username and password to ensure that only the profile owner posts information to his or her page, and to provide tailored advertisements to users and data to marketing companies. The availability of the information posted, however, is determined by the profile owner, who can expressly make the information available to the public. Thus, old paradigms of IRB rules related to Internet research may need reconsideration.

Website purpose and privacy statements

A reasonable expectation of privacy for an SMW user is comprised of a combination of the intent of the Website as well as the Website's explicit statement of privacy rules. The most consistency between Website intent and Privacy Policy is that of Twitter, which explicitly stated “our Services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world …… Our default is almost always to make the information you provide public but we generally give you settings to make the information more private if you want. Your public information is broadly and instantly disseminated.”

Similarly, YouTube's statement of intent of being a forum of sharing videos publicly is consistent with their Privacy Policy. At the time of this article, this policy stated that one “may control the information that is available to other users and your confirmed friends at any time.”

The statement of intent for LinkedIn is “connecting the world's professionals.” This statement has consistency with the site's Privacy Policy, which stated “The information you provide to LinkedIn may reveal, or allow others to identify, your nationality, ethnic origin, religion, gender, age, geography, or other aspects of your private life.” These synergistic statements present a clear expectation that the responsibility of the content of displayed information and its protection lies with the profile owner.

As we now return to the Facebook Privacy Policy, the described intention of the site was to share information with people. This intent was reflected in the first part of the Privacy Policy, which states “When you publish content or information using the ‘everyone’ setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).” Further in the Privacy Policy, a statement indicated “Information set to ‘everyone’ is publicly available information….Such information may, for example, be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), be indexed by third-party search engines and be imported, exported, distributed and re-distributed by us and others without privacy limitations.” These statements demonstrated clear wording and were directed at the user. Thus, Facebook informed the user that if the profile security settings are publicly available, the profile owners should not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Facebook also discussed access to information by third parties through these statements: “We generally limit search engines' access to our site. We may allow them to access information set to the ‘everyone’ setting (along with your name and profile picture) and your profile information that is visible to everyone.” Facebook then explained how this access to information by third parties can be avoided: “You can change the visibility of some of your profile information using the customize section of your privacy settings.”

Separate from the Privacy Policy was a Rights-and-Responsibilities hyperlink. This section explained, “If you collect information from users, you will: obtain their consent, make it clear you (and not Facebook) are the one collecting their information, and post a privacy policy explaining what information you collect and how you will use it.” This statement appeared to be directed at a third party, such as a researcher who aimed to collect information from Facebook profiles. Thus, a contradiction exists between the statements in the Privacy Policy compared to the Rights and Responsibilities sections regarding their intended audience as well as their direction.

Legal considerations

Many IRBs seek guidance from court cases involving the invasion of privacy to determine what would constitute a privacy violation in the research context. Under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, individuals are protected from governmental searches when and where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. This expectation is limited by what society recognizes as reasonable, given the circumstances of the individual at the time of the search. Courts have held, for example, that an individual generally has a reasonable expectation of privacy within his or her own home, but does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in things the individual knowingly exposes to the public. 19 The right to privacy is similarly recognized in civil cases between nongovernmental parties. A defendant can be liable, for example, when he or she makes public disclosures of private facts about the plaintiff. Courts deciding such cases often apply a reasonable expectation of privacy analysis to the alleged disclosure, typically finding that a fact is private when a reasonable person in the plaintiff's position would expect the fact to be private.

Federal and state courts have examined Facebook's privacy policy and determined that individuals do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information they post on their Facebook pages. In Romano v. Steelcase (2010), the plaintiff Romano sued the Steelcase Company for damages, claiming that their actions had caused her permanent injury and suffering. Steelcase sought information from Romano's current and historical Facebook accounts, including deleted pages, to rebut these claims. The court granted Steelcase's request to access the information on these pages, holding that Romano did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information that she published on social networking Websites. The court noted that Facebook privacy policies plainly state that information users' post may be shared with others, and that information sharing is the very nature and purpose of these SNSs, else they would cease to exist. Courts have concluded that a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in writings that the person posts on a social networking Website and makes available to the public. 20 Another court concluded that users would logically lack a legitimate expectation of privacy in the materials intended for publication or public posting. 21 This has become a generally accepted principal of law (92 A.L.R. 5 th 15§ 4.5).

Interactive Research

Interactive research takes place when a researcher wishes to assess the SMW content that is not publicly available. To access this information, the researcher needs to contact the participant for permission to view the content. On Facebook, this interaction may include a friend request. Some have argued that a friend request may lead to a misrepresentation of the researcher's intentions for the relationship. Similarly, on Twitter, access to protected Tweets means that the researcher must become a follower of that participant, also potentially implying a closeness of relationship. It is important to recognize that the terms “friending” and “following” have very different meanings for those inhabiting today's social media world. Previous studies have determined that Facebook friending implies a loose-tie relationship, often including associates or acquaintances. 12 Further, the absolute number of Facebook friends is often considered a marker of positive social capital. 12 , 22 On Twitter, users can be followers of people they have never personally met, such as celebrities and politicians. Thus, both friending and following in and of itself are unlikely to trigger unreasonable expectations for a close or prolonged relationship on the part of participants.

If the researcher conducts a study involving minors, it is likely that including friending or following would constitute interaction and participation in the research venue. In this type of study, it is worth considering the categories of research that include waivers of parental consent. An IRB may approve a consent procedure that does not include parental consent if the project involves no more than minimal risk to the participants; the waiver will not adversely affect the rights and welfare of the subjects; the research could not be practically carried out without the waiver; and the subjects will be provided with additional pertinent information after participation when appropriate. 23

Survey/Interview Research

Risks regarding consent in the smw arena.

Two potential concerns exist when conducting informed consent online. A first concern is the lack of face-to-face contact with participants. When approaching participants on SMWs, or collecting data from the online representations of participants, there are often situations in which the researcher has no direct face-to-face contact with the participant. Thus, there may be reduced opportunities for the researcher to observe participant reactions to the consent process. Concerns regarding the lack of physical interaction during the consent process are more salient when the study collects information that is potentially illegal or stigmatizing, or when the study participant will be from an at-risk population such as minors or people who are cognitively impaired.

This is a valid concern, but not one that is unique to SMWs. Many research studies employ mailed surveys and consent forms, situations that do not provide opportunities to interact with participants. It is also possible that online recruitment and consent processes may increase the likelihood that a researcher will hear from participants if questions or concerns arise when compared to mailed surveys. Given that people may be more likely to lash out inappropriately or flame online, there is the implication of a heightened sense of security and safety when conversing over the Internet. Hence, this may increase the likelihood that the participant will contact the researcher online with questions arising from an online consent form compared to the participant taking the effort to call to address the concerns about a mailed consent form.

A second concern is how to obtain parental consent. Federal research regulations state that minors under the age of 18 years must have parental consent and minor assent to participate in most research trials, unless the study receives a waiver of parental consent. Obtaining parental consent in a study that involves recruitment through SMWs provides new challenges, as a minor may be able to complete the parental consent process posing online as the parent. Adolescents are typically more Internet savvy than their parents and may find this process quite simple. However, this risk is not unique to SMW research. Minors can and have easily forged their parent's signature using traditional paper consent forms. Although representing a parent's consent online by checking a box may be easier than forging a parent's signature, both methods are possible and easily achieved by a modern adolescent.

Confidentiality: A Key to Any Social Media Research Approach

An important area of concern with SMW research is the protection of confidentiality. Similar to other types of research involving survey or interview data, protection of participant identities is critical. Website research may initially be perceived as lower risk, because participant information can be collected in absence of some Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-protected information such as address or phone number. Online data can present increased risks; studies that publish direct text quotes from an SMW may directly identify participants. Entering a direct quote from an SMW into a Google search engine can lead to a specific Web link, such as a link to that person's LinkedIn profile, and thus identify the participant.

Presenting unique combinations of data that are linked to individuals may also identify participants. These concerns were clearly demonstrated through controversy surrounding the Tastes, Ties, and Time project. 16 In this project, researchers downloaded a large dataset of Facebook information from a single university. The identities of some participants were eventually determined based on the uniqueness of the information presented. The university was identified through the list of college majors represented in the study population. Further, some participants were identified by being a member of an under-represented minority group. This project stirred ongoing controversy regarding confidentiality within Facebook research. 24

Recommended Considerations

To conclude, SMWs are immensely popular and present new opportunities for research as well as new challenges for IRBs to evaluate these proposals' risks and benefits. In considering risks of SMW research, IRBs should balance consideration of unique risks with those consistent with traditional research methods.

Thus, specific recommendations for researchers and IRBs include the following:

• • IRBs should consider whether the proposed study meets criteria as the human subject research. For example, an analysis of YouTube videos depicting dental hygiene practices is a study involving video clips, not human subjects. As another example, a researcher proposes to study how many Facebook pages depict images of families without collecting any profile owner identifiers on the page such as age, sex, or location. In this case, the unit of analysis is the page rather than the profile owner.
• • IRBs should give consideration to the risk level and content of the study. For example, a project that evaluates how many times a 12-year-old tweets the word “like” has a low risk level. In contrast, a project that observes an online group discussion of adolescent HIV patients to see which ones report noncompliance with medications has a higher risk level. Increased attention should be devoted to higher-risk studies, concomitant with a higher threshold to grant waiver of the participant consent. IRB proposals that include collection of illegal or stigmatizing information from SMWs, or involve data collection from minor's SMW profiles, should be considered carefully.

Interactive research

• • Researchers should present an accurate portrayal of their identity on SMWs, but undue concerns regarding participants' investment in the relationship defined by friending or following is likely unnecessary.

Survey/interview research

• • Researchers should provide contact information for questions during the consent process, including contact information online and via SMW that can be monitored and responded to quickly.
• • In the future, SMW researchers should consider using SMWs to obtain parental consent for adolescents' participation in research studies, as parents are increasingly becoming the members of the SMW sites such as Facebook. 25

Overall Recommendations

• (a) To protect confidentiality, researchers should understand the risks of and avoid direct text quotes in presenting SMW text quotations from research subjects. Researchers should avoid presenting participants' personal information in the ways that they could be identified within their schools or communities.
• (b) One Facebook section, Applicable to Developers/Operators of Applications and Websites, included the following statement at the time of this article: “you will only request data you need to operate your application.” This section also instructed outside parties: “you will have a privacy policy that tells users what user data you are going to use and how you will use, display, share, or transfer that data.” Researchers should consider applying these principles by only collecting the essential data needed to answer the research question, and presenting those data carefully to avoid participant identification. Researchers should consider listing a privacy policy on their laboratory Webpages, as well as developing a laboratory SMW page that describes what data they use and how they are used. One possible strategy is to develop a Facebook page as a professional identity for the principal investigator or staff, separate from a personal Facebook page. In this way, participants can friend the researcher in a professional rather than personal context.
• (c) A little-recognized, but challenging, issue is that each state has its own law regarding informed consent. This includes how the consent should be documented and the age at which consent can be obtained for various health topics. How, or whether, this process applies to SMW is unclear. If the researcher is located in Illinois and conducting a multistate survey of Twitter users, what level of regulation should take precedence? This issue merits further discussion and consideration as researchers move toward more fully harnessing the global research opportunities provided by SMWs.

Acknowledgments

Funding for this project was provided in part by the University of Wisconsin Graduate School. The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Lil Larson, Jessica Hirsch, and Monet McGruder to this project.

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing interests are present for any author.

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Ethics of Social Media

Technology grows at an exponential rate and moral law cannot evolve and accommodate its pace, leaving the ethicalness of new innovations up for debate. Throughout human history, communication was vital for technological advancement to take place. In recent decades though, the trend has reversed; technological advancements now serve as a medium for human interaction. The internet has engulfed aspects of human life, such as social networking.

MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other sites that work to serve as social networking sites are highly accessible and are used by a copious amount of people in modern society. The problem is that online social interaction is used blindly and widely without regards to ethical theories established by philosophers of the past. When applied to these theories, this new form of social networking can be determined as either ethically viable or morally unsound. Before the advent of actual social media sites, online interaction was viewed with disdain by modern philosophers.

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Philosophers such as Albert Borgmann critiqued what he called “hyperreality”, a social reality in which one can create a glorified and distorted version of him/herself. Borgmann asserts that hyperreality leaves us disappointed and defeated when we are forced to face organic reality once again. Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus joins Borgann’s criticism of online interaction and adds that communication through the internet lacks the risk of communicating in person. Without risk, Dreyfus further explains, there is no commitment within online interaction and consequently, no meaning.

Both of these criticisms attack the consequences of online interaction, claiming that in essence, social interaction via internet dilutes social bonds, challenges the premise of traditional interaction, and dehumanizes society as a whole. Borgmann and Dreyfus approach the idea of online social networking as consequentialists and claim that interacting on this new medium is morally wrong because of what the consequences harbor. By highlighting consequences, Borgmann and Dreyfus, at least with this issue, adopt a Utilitarian point of view, but do not follow through with their assessment of online socializing.

The utilitarian point of view takes in account every consequence, weighs the good against the bad using a process called hedonic calculation, and applies the final product to society. Good and bad is measured in terms of pleasure or pain; if an action causes more pleasure than pain, it is deemed morally good. If an action is predicted to bring about more pain than pleasure, then the action is unethical. The driving ideology behind Utilitarianism is to dispute the “misconception that morality has nothing to do with usefulness or utility or utility or that morality is opposed to pleasure”(Mackinnon).

This means that just because something is functional and pleasurable doesn’t mean that it is immoral. Social media is a good example of this, for it is both resourceful and enjoyable. Borgmann and Dreyfus criticize the negative potential aspects of online social interaction, but their claims have little substance. Borgmann’s assertion that “hyperreality” devalues organic reality is only hypothetical. The idea that one who participates in socializing online loses appreciation for person to person interaction cannot be viably proven and is therefore potentially fictitious.

Even if Borgmann’s theory is right, one can equally argue that the use of a “hyperreality” highlights the difference between digital communication and organic communication, leading to an ascended form of appreciation for traditional, in person interaction. Dreyfus’ criticism of the lack of risk and commitment that internet interaction allows stems from the anonymity that the internet can provide. When identity is obscured through the veil of online socialization, accountability is lost.

Users in online forums can say whatever they wish to say and they’re output is never fully attached to their identity, thus eliminating risk and commitment to opinions. That might be true in a broad sense, but social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, sites that dominate modern social culture, solve Dreyfus’ problem by attaching users’ identity to what is posted. Granted, online identities are created and are completely controlled by participating users who may be completely different in reality compared to who is presented online. In that sense, one may still hide in ambiguity when using the internet as a means for socialization.

But isn’t every identity, organic or digital, created and built? A person who creates a false persona online can just as easily adopt a fake personality in public. So how is online social interaction any less than real life socialization, in regards to faulty identity? And with accountability established with online identification through Facebook and Twitter, risk and commitment is actually increased. With organic socialization, there is always a chance of an accidental outburst that doesn’t reflect one’s true perspective and doesn’t characterize identity.

Online socializers present themselves however they wish to be perceived with greater extent than how they could do so in person. On social media sites, everything is deliberate; every post is completely controlled by the user. That means that since complete control can exist in an online realm, accountability is increased, putting Dreyfus’ concerns to rest. On the opposite side of the criticism stands the practicality and usefulness that social media can have. Socializing online is the evolved form of interacting with other humans.

These digital outlets serve the people as a means to connect with society on a scale larger than ever possible. LinkedIn expands professional personas, YouTube allows people to see what others see, Twitter spreads our words quicker and farther across our social domains, Facebook connects us with “friends” from all across the world. Each of these social media sites have their own distinct agenda, but as a whole they promote social cohesiveness, connection, that could not be otherwise achieved. But social media is not only beneficial to its participants, it offers benefits to those outside society as well.

Sites like Twitter act as a social database and can be used to measure society’s attitudes and beliefs, reactions to current events, and public opinion. These sites are also a new frontier for businesses looking to connect with their consumers, expand based on demand, and provide a product better suited for the public. Current events or broad information spreads as quickly as possible and is easily accessible. If Kant’s reasoning test was applied to social media, if everyone were to participate with good intention, everyone would benefit from the knowledge and cohesiveness and harmony would be established, information wise.

Borgmann and Dreyfus criticize potential negative consequences of social media, but do not focus on the potential and practical positive possibilities that social media carries. When both negative and positive factors are weighed against each other, it becomes evident that social media is simply part of the evolution that traditional interaction has undergone. While online socialization has not replaced traditional interaction, it has established itself as a peripheral tool in a networking society. Social media is also becoming more and more accessible as technology further advances.

Now, users do not need a computer to access online social networks, they can simply use their mobile phones. This has aroused new contemporary concerns of human detachment. People can be so wrapped up in online networking that they will ignore their immediate surroundings. While this is a viable concern, it can be solved through temperance. Aristotle’s view on virtue is based on moderation. Too much or too little of something results in vices, moderation and temperance results in virtue. Blaming social media is like blaming food if someone is obese. The food is not the problem, it is a necessity, but gluttony is.

Social media isn’t what is immoral, it is exuberance that acts as a vice. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, hesitation to socialize would be the opposing vice, meaning that those who are completely opposed to socialization, even when the tides are turning in the favor of online socialization, are just as immoral as those who are constantly absorbed by social media. There is nothing wrong with challenging the advent of online sites that promote socialization. They are new and unfamiliar, and as with all things unfamiliar, have the potential to be threatening.

Philosophers who oppose online interaction are justified in that right, but their weariness can end. When applied to ethics, when held under the light of the theories formed by history’s most renowned philosophers, social media is proven to be ethically sound. Albert Borgmann, Hubert Dreyfus, and other contemporary philosophers must acknowledge that Immanuel Kant, Utilitarian leaders like John Stuart Mill, and even Aristotle would view social media as a transcended, critical accessory to human interaction that is morally safe and sound.

Works Cited Borgmann, A. , 1984, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacKinnon, Barbara. Ethics, Theory And Contemporary Issues. 7th . Boston: Wadsworth Pub Co, 2012. Print. Vallor, Shannon, “Social Networking and Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed. ), forthcoming URL = <http://plato. stanford. edu/archives/win2012/entries/ethics-social-networking/>.

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Trump’s Social Media Company Opens New Avenue for Conflicts of Interest

Ethics experts say Trump Media, now a publicly traded company, would present a new way for foreign actors or others to influence Donald J. Trump, if he is elected president.

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By Sharon LaFraniere

When former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company went public this week, supporters and investors betting on Mr. Trump’s political success helped drive the value of a loss-making firm through the roof. Mr. Trump ended the first day of public trading $4.6 billion richer on paper.

If Mr. Trump is elected president, it may not be the last time the company is used as a vehicle to benefit Mr. Trump’s pocketbook, experts said.

Trump Media & Technology Group — the owner of Truth Social, the site Mr. Trump uses to rally his backers and blast his opponents — could present a new, fairly straightforward route for foreign leaders or special interests to try to influence him. Should he retain his control of the company while in office, the ethical questions that arose from Mr. Trump’s hotels and other properties in his first term as president would only multiply when applied to a publicly traded media company, they said.

“This will be a very easy vehicle for foreign governments that want to curry favor with the president to throw money at him in a way that benefits his financial bottom line,” said Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at Harvard University and a top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush.

Corporations and other players wanting to sway Mr. Trump could buy advertising on Truth Social, other experts said. They could try to get on his radar by buying shares in the company. As the nation’s leader whose every utterance is monitored around the world, Mr. Trump would also be in an extraordinary position to drive traffic — and ultimately revenue — by the habitual use of the site.

Ethics experts see few legal obstacles to these scenarios. Presidents are not covered by federal conflict-of-interest law, and efforts to use constitutional checks failed during Mr. Trump’s first term.

Asked how Mr. Trump would manage his roughly 60 percent stake in Trump Media if elected, Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, said he would “follow ethics guidelines,” but did not offer specifics.

A number of presidents tried to steer clear of the appearance of profiting off their position by voluntarily putting their assets and investments in blind trusts. President Biden did not need to do that because he invested only in diversified funds that included a variety of companies, a White House spokesman said. Mr. Trump’s decision to maintain his financial interest in his real-estate businesses while president overturned prevailing ethical norms.

Mr. Trump’s critics filed multiple lawsuits claiming that he violated the emoluments, or anti-corruption, clauses of the Constitution, language designed to prevent a president from profiting from his official position, and foreign or state officials from influencing a president through gifts or benefits. They argued that Mr. Trump had illegally benefited from payments from foreign leaders and others who patronized his properties.

But the lawsuits were either dismissed or, after Mr. Trump lost his 2020 re-election bid, declared moot by the Supreme Court . It was never established what constituted an emoluments violation and what would be the remedy.

“I don’t have any doubt whatsoever that the emoluments clause would prove even less an obstacle to Donald Trump were he elected in November than it was when he was president before,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal appeals court judge who has argued that Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election disqualify him from holding public office.

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, who led a congressional inquiry into Mr. Trump’s conflicts of interest, said: “The emoluments clause right now has been reduced to nothingness. In order to breathe life back into it, Congress must develop a legislative machinery to enforce the principle.”

Foreign or special interests are not the only concern that arises with presidential control of a media company, said Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush and who later ran for Congress as a Democrat.

If Mr. Trump were re-elected and used Truth Social to communicate in the way that he used Twitter during his first term, Mr. Painter said, “he would be helping himself to profits through United States government traffic” while putting Truth Social’s competitors at an unfair disadvantage.

He said Mr. Trump would most likely face the same type of criticism that dogged Silvio Berlusconi, whose company controlled much of the national television broadcasting in Italy while he served as the country’s prime minister. Mr. Berlusconi, who served nine years as prime minister, dismissed allegations of conflicts of interest by saying that he had relinquished control of his media empire to his sons. Three independent watchdog groups said Mr. Berlusconi’s control of major media outlets threatened or limited the independence and diversity of Italy’s press.

After Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, his advisers said that presidents were not required to separate themselves from their financial assets and that Mr. Trump’s precautions would be sufficient to protect him from influence seekers . Mr. Trump described the emoluments clause as “phony.”

He gave his sons day-to-day control of the Trump Organization, the main umbrella group for his businesses, but was still closely tied to the organization . Mr. Trump also pledged to donate any profits from foreign government spending to the U.S. Treasury.

Mr. Raskin and other Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability estimated that Mr. Trump’s businesses garnered at least $7.8 million from foreign governments or their leaders while he was in office, mostly from China and Saudi Arabia. The Trump Organization donated only about $459,000 to the Treasury, they said.

Perhaps even more than with his hotels, golf courses and other enterprises, Mr. Trump’s personal involvement in the social media company is considered critical to its success.

In filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Digital World Acquisition Corporation, the company behind the merger, tied the operation’s hopes directly to Mr. Trump. Were Mr. Trump to divest of his financial interest, or no longer devote a substantial amount of time to Truth Social, the business could suffer, the filings stated.

Mr. Trump created Truth Social in 2021 after Twitter barred him from its platform, citing the risk of violence. Mr. Trump has fewer than seven million followers, compared with about 87 million on X, formerly Twitter. He continued to post almost exclusively on Truth Social even after X reinstated him in November 2022, a sign of his commitment to the platform.

During the first nine months of last year, Trump Media took in just $3.3 million in revenue — all from advertising on Truth Social — and had a net loss of $49 million. But after concluding the merger, Trump Media closed its first day of trading on Nasdaq under the ticker DJT, with an estimated market value of close to $8 billion. That is more than 2,000 times its estimated annual revenue and more than the valuation of corporations like Alaska Airlines and Western Union.

The stock was so high-flying that trading in its shares had to be briefly halted because of extreme volatility.

Mr. Trump, who has been scrambling to post a $175 million bond stemming from a civil fraud case, is currently prohibited from cashing out his shares for six months.

Although Mr. Trump will not serve as the firm’s chairman, the board is stacked with staunch allies. Besides his son, Donald Trump Jr., they include: Devin Nunes, a former Republican congressman from California and Trump Media’s chief executive; Kash Patel, who served as Mr. Trump’s counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council and who has suggested that some journalists will be legal targets if Mr. Trump is re-elected; Robert Lighthizer, the former U.S. Trade Representative; and Linda McMahon, a Trump campaign fund-raiser who led the Small Business Administration under Mr. Trump.

Matthew Goldstein contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Sharon LaFraniere is an investigative reporter currently focusing on Republican candidates in the 2024 presidential election. More about Sharon LaFraniere

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Donald Trump, who ends many of his rallies with a churchlike ritual, has infused his movement with Christianity .

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Trump's potential Truth Social earnout is an avenue for outside interests if he becomes president, experts say

• Donald Trump is set to see an earnout of over 35 million shares from his Trump Media holding company over the next year that would coincide with him potentially being president.
• The schedule of Trump's financial earnings could lead to either foreign or domestic interests potentially investing in the company as a way to try to pressure and sway Trump while he is commander in chief, experts say.
• Trump Media disclosed that it had a net loss of $58 million in 2023.

In this article

Donald Trump's scheduled earnout through the parent company of Truth Social presents opportunities for outside interests if he were to defeat Joe Biden and become president again, according to experts.

Trump, who owns more than 50% of Trump Media and Technology Group 's outstanding shares, is set to see an earnout of over 35 million shares from the holding company over at least the next year that would coincide with him potentially being president, according to a new disclosure filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission . That schedule of Trump's financial earnings could lead to either foreign or domestic interests potentially investing in the company as a way to try to pressure and sway Trump while he's commander in chief, the experts explained.

"I have a number of concerns," said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel for the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

"Obviously, I would be most concerned about foreign interests that make significant investments in his company with an expectation that they will be given some sort of favored treatment when the need arises — even if it would threaten U.S. national security interests and historical alliances," Canter said.

A spokesman for Trump did not return a request for comment before publication.

Trump's earnings are under the condition that the stock has to hit a certain value within a specific time frame for the former president to see any of his owed shares. He's also under a lock-up agreement which will disallow him from cashing out his shares for six months, unless he receives a waiver.

If Trump Media and Technology Group's share price, for instance,  equals or exceeds "$12.50 per share for twenty (20) out of any thirty (30) trading days" from t he recent closing date to go public and the 18-month anniversary of that agreement, Trump will be "entitled to receive 13,500,000 earnout shares," according to the disclosure.

The new Trump media stock has been on a wild swing since it began trading. The share price soared as much as 50% when it started trading on the Nasdaq on March 26. Shares were down about 20% Monday .

"Whether or not he receives earnouts, the value of his stock can increase dramatically based on his own acts in office or by those seeking to gain his favor, including institutional investors and foreign entities," Kedric Payne, a vice president and general counsel at watchdog Campaign Legal Center, said in a statement to CNBC. "Also, many investors may simply buy stock in the president's company because they rationally expect that he will do everything in his power to increase the value."

Payne said the overall stock price may fluctuate if there was an attempt to use an investment to try to influence Trump while he is president.

Trump could also "borrow against his own appreciated shares" and use it to self-fund his campaign, Peter Schiff, a veteran stockbroker, said in a post on X . He suggested that Trump's supporters could end up buying the Trump company's stock instead of donating to his campaign to help the former president finance his latest bid for the White House.

Such a move would arrive as Trump is struggling to raise money for his campaign while using donor contributions to help pay his extensive legal fees. He's also expected to post a $175 million bond .

The stark reality of the stock price does not appear to reflect Trump Media and Technology Group's overall business, which relies in large part on Trump and his followers to help it grow, according to another disclosure.

The company disclosed that it had a net loss of $58 million in 2023. It conceded in another document that its business plan relies on Trump's popularity and his large social media following to make the move over to Truth Social for the company to have success.

Trump has just over 87 million followers on X but on Truth Social he has just under 7 million. Trump is ahead of Biden in the polls by only one percentage point, according to a Real Clear Politics polling average.

"In the event any of these, or other events, cause his followers to lose interest in his messages, the number of users of our platform could decline or not grow as we have assumed. To the extent users prefer a platform that is not associated with President Trump, TMTG's ability to attract users may decrease," the Trump Media and Technology Group wrote in a filing.