Internet Research Ethics

In this rapidly changing and rich media landscape, there are multiple, new and emerging ways in which people communicate their opinions regarding contemporary issues, presenting new opportunities for social research. Social media has become a major platform from which people source, share and discuss news and current affairs. It not only provides new opportunities for researchers; it presents significant ethical challenges. These challenges should concern anyone working with online data as the consequences of not addressing them can be serious. There are economic, as well as moral and legal arguments for internet research ethics. In their new data ethics book, Gry Hasselbalch and Pernille Tranberg argue that companies and organisations who consider ethics a social responsibility have a competitive edge over those who do not. Starting out as a social media researcher, I was of the view that the public nature of social media data meant I did not need to concern myself with research ethics; that, much like a published news article, I was free to analyse Facebook pages and public groups. It was not until I came across Michael Zimmer's article on the ethics of Facebook research that I began to think seriously about internet research ethics. This article led me to investigate further, firstly by contacting other social media researchers. I asked, " is the 'it's public' defence arguable? Do I need ethics approval? Should I consider strategies like paraphrasing of data? " My inquiries pointed strongly to ethics as a serious and growing issue of concern for internet researchers and others working with online data, but I received no definitive answers to my questions. Desktop research uncovered guidelines and other resources which quickly expanded my knowledge of the topic. These guidelines outlined various ethical issues, posed questions and provided case studies. I wanted something prescriptive, but my research only led to further research questions and conversations with academics. It felt like I was going around in circles. During this process my concerns about the legal implications of my research and my reputation as an emerging social media researcher were joined by genuine concerns for the privacy and safety of social media users. The process led me to consider my values as a feminist researcher and how these, along with other considerations, might inform any decisions I made around ethics. Below I present some of the key ethical issues and possible ways around them. This discussion is by no means exhaustive, so this article also provides links to further reading. In addition to the concerns listed below, researchers and data driven journalists should consider any relevant ethical guidelines, laws and platform policies provided by the social networks themselves.

The open science (OS) movement has advocated for increased transparency in certain aspects of research. Communication is taking its first steps toward OS as some journals have adopted OS guidelines codified by another discipline. We find this pursuit troubling as OS prioritizes openness while insufficiently addressing essential ethical principles: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Some recommended open science practices increase the potential for harm for marginalized participants, communities, and researchers. We elaborate how OS can serve a marginalizing force within academia and the research community, as it overlooks the needs of marginalized scholars and excludes some forms of scholarship. We challenge the current instantiation of OS and propose a divergent agenda for the future of Communication research centered on ethical, inclusive research practices.

The ethnographic mindset is instrumental in helping those who design our future interfaces and infrastructures understand the complexity of the human experience. How might our products be used as interventions rather than just descriptions, to encourage different structures and interfaces for social practice? In this chapter (draft of forthcoming piece in Denzin & Lincoln's 5th edition Handbook of Qualitative Research), I trace certain terminological shifts in how internet research has been conceptualized. I then offer a working heuristic that illustrates research stances toward internet phenomena, which in turn illustrates some of the ways research stances may be shifting. I move to a more concrete discussion of how shifting one’s stance can impact not only one’s methods in the field, but also the outcome and audience of one’s inquiry. I conclude by emphasizing the urgent need to recognize that our scholarship matters in the larger sense, and to accept the opportunity and ethical responsibility to use our research abilities to not simply describe or explain what is or has been, but to speculate about and shape what we ought to become.

In the last several decades, neoliberal discourse has dramatically reshaped welfare policy in the Western industrialised world through its emphasis on economic participation, self-reliance and personal accountability. Literature shows that institutional discourse about sole mothers shifted during this period – from one that historically viewed them as morally irresponsible to one that increasingly views them as welfare dependent and economically irresponsible.  However, less is known about the role of neoliberal discourse in shaping people’s perceptions of sole mother poverty and welfare.

This study explores online news comments about the Gillard government’s sole parent welfare amendments – a period of intense welfare debate.  Specifically, this research asks, what are online media commenters’ perceptions of sole mother poverty and welfare in an age of neoliberalism? A thematic analysis of online comments, posted between May 2012 and March 2014, was conducted in NVivo 11.  The comments were then examined within an analytical framework that drew on Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ method, as well as Foucauldian ideas and feminist perspectives. 

Findings reveal that the most dominant perception of sole mother poverty and welfare use is that they arise from the characteristics and choices of sole mothers, for example their alleged laziness and reproductive and parental irresponsibility.  However, sole mother commenters speak about the implications and consequences of the 2012 welfare amendments for their lives, with many fearful of the future.  These women share stories of hardship, abandonment, trauma and resilience.  Their comments reveal multiple barriers to financial security, such as inaccessible and unaffordable childcare and the underpayment and non-payment of child support.  Crucially, this research finds that across the comments, paid work among mothers is normalised, productivity is conflated with paid work participation, and care work is devalued or rendered invisible.  These findings suggest that a ‘good’ mother is no longer one who stays at home and nurtures her children.  In an age of neoliberalism, a ‘good’ and ‘responsible’ parent is one who participates in paid work regardless of gender and caring responsibility.

In addition to the overarching discourse of neoliberalism, other dominant discourses and alternative perspectives are reflected in the comments of online media commenters.  The influence of several scientific discourses, as well as activist discourses that have become institutionalised over time, such as those that emerged from women’s and fathers’ rights movements, are echoed in the comments.  Alternative perspectives consider the impact of social and circumstantial factors in the lives of sole mothers and often reflect lived experiences of poverty, welfare use and sole motherhood. 

Overall, this research uncovers a multiplicity of perceptions of the causes of sole mother poverty and welfare use in Australia.  Nevertheless, it finds that political discourse and other dominant discourses play a significant role in shaping how people perceive policy issues, such as sole mother poverty and welfare use.  This finding has implications for sole mothers and others who experience poverty or marginalisation as negative attitudes lead to stigmatisation and discrimination and impact on policy in a ‘vicious cycle’ (Schofield & Butterworth 2015).

The purpose of this article is to illuminate the conceptualisations and applications of the Belmont Report's key ethical principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice based on a document analysis of five of the most relevant disciplinary guidelines on internet research in the social sciences. These seminal documents are meant to provide discipline-specific guidance for research design and implementation and are regarded as key references when conducting research online. Our analysis revealed that the principles of respect and beneficence were explicitly conveyed in the documents analysed, offering nuanced interpretations on issues of informed consent, privacy, and benefits and risks as well as providing recommendations for modifying traditional practices to fit the online setting. However, the invocations of the principle of justice were rather implicit and reflect an important shift from the Belmont Report's protectionist ethical position towards more situational and dialogic approaches. With the rapidly evolving nature of internet technologies, this analysis is projected to contribute to the ongoing developments in research ethics in the social sciences by outlining the tensions and implications of the use of the internet as a methodological tool. We also seek to provide recommendations on how disciplinary associations can proceed to facilitate ethically sensitive internet research.

Purpose – This article aims to present current and potential uses of innovative social research methodologies which harness emergent technologies. This article also seeks to note ethical issues surrounding emergent technologies.

Design/methodology/approach – Specifically, the use of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook as well as their applications will be explored. The use of iPhones as data gathering devices will also be explored as an example of the utility of ubiquitous technologies to ethnographic work.

Findings – This paper finds that emergent technologically-mediated ethnographic methods are of potential value to organizational ethnographers and that methodological barriers can be overcome to best leverage new media technologies in organizational ethnography.

Research limitations/implications – This article has not been designed as a comprehensive overview of these social research methods nor as a primer to implement them. Rather, the main purpose of it is to begin to explore their potential applications to organizational research and to raise awareness amongst organizational researchers.

Originality/value – This article is original in its review of emergent digital research methods for qualitative organizational research. It reviews newer technologies and presents cases from the literature to highlight the varied methodological approaches implemented by organizational and other researchers in the field.

This chapter examines the putatively simple concepts of "revenge porn" and "nonconsensual pornography" to argue that these are really complex online phenomena. While partisan narratives tend to see them as simple and unified occurrences, we demonstrate the variations of revenge porn posting behaviors.  Using this novel analysis as a foundation, we discuss a series of revenge porn posting cases to demonstrate the complex nature of consent in the world of online content sharing.

As use of the Internet has grown, so to has the amount of research concerning various aspects of computer-mediated communication (CMC). In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of research projects dealing with Internet-based, synchronous chat programs. Although timely, this increased research interest in synchronous chat media is problematic due to potential ethical dilemmas regarding data gathering and research publication. This paper examines the ethical problems related to subject identity, privacy and "chat copyright" in synchronous online research. Additionally, it addresses possible strategies for minimizing ethical conflict, while maintaining research integrity.

Any implementation of personalized learning and teaching through big data will have implications for research ethics. This chapter considers the research ethics implications in certain key regulatory documents and the scholarship on research ethics and learning analytics. Finally, the chapter provides guidelines for use by researchers and research ethics review committees-within the field of education in the South African context-specifically focusing on personalized learning and teaching through big data and learning analytics.

While philosophical writings are useful for academic conferences and esoteric papers, they too often provide too little substantive direction for researchers and others in the trenches. (Jim Thomas, 2004, p. 189) "Fool, Fool! Back to the beginning is the rule!" (Inigo to Fezzik, The

"The work represented in this document emerges from theoretical, empirical, and field research conducted by members of the Association of Internet Researchers, including members of the AoIR Ethics Working Group. The AoIR ethics working committee, with extensive feedback from AoIR membership including at workshops conducted annually at the AoIR internet research conferences, from 2005 through the present, has developed this 2012 version in an effort to recognize and respond to the array of changing technologies and ongoing developments that affect the ethics of internet research. We emphasize that no set of guidelines or rules is static; the fields of internet research are dynamic and heterogeneous. This dynamism is reflected in the fact that as of the time of this writing, no official guidance or “answers” regarding internet research ethics have been adopted at any national or international level. This document aligns with and extends the first AoIR document, which was released in 2002. This 2012 document presents a series of considerations designed to support and inform those responsible for making decisions about the ethics of internet research. And, while primarily directed at researchers, it provides a resource for a wide audience of other stakeholders such as review boards, ethicists, and students, by providing a current discussion of important ethical issues and pertinent literature in the field.

Online forums provide a wealth of publicly accessible data and have proven particularly useful for critical psychologists wishing to examine naturalistic data on a wide range of social phenomena. This article begins by considering the use of online discussion forums for critical discursive psychological research and outlines ethical debates regarding their use (particularly in light of past and current British Psychological Society guidelines). To demonstrate how such data can be used in critical psychology I provide an illustrative example of a discursive analysis of a single online discussion thread taken from a diabetes newsgroup that examines anti-social online behaviours in the form of “trolling,” “flaming,” and heterosexism.

An important feature of e-research is the increased mediation of research practices, which changes not only the objects and tools of research, but also the relation between researcher and object, between researchers, and between researchers and their constituencies and stakeholders. This article focuses on the ethical aspects of e-research by analysing the implications of these changing relationships in the case of ethnography in mediated settings. It makes a specific contribution to the discussions about research ethics that are currently pursued and that tend to be catalysed by institutional review boards. The authors aim to link ethical discussions with the actual practices and conditions of qualitative social research. To do so, they review how researchers have used principles and ethical guides of traditional disciplines in ethnography, and show that several of concepts and categories on which these guidelines rely (personhood, privacy, harm, alienation, power) are otherwise enacted in mediated settings. The authors also analyze the ethical issues that have arisen in our own research. On the basis of these discussions, they specify two of the underlying dynamics of research in mediated settings, contiguity and traceability, in order to understand why traditional research ethics are challenged by these settings. The article specifies how mediated contexts can shape ethical issues; it provides a concise yet illustrative elaboration of a number of these issues; and proposes a vocabulary to further discuss this aspect of ethnographic work. Together, these elements amount to a contribution for the elaboration of new ethical research practices for social research in mediated settings.

This chapter is grounded in the notion that “doing the right thing” is an outcome of rhetorically powerful tangles of human and non-human elements, embedded in deep—often invisible—structures of software, politics, and habits. Every action we take as individuals—whether designers, programmers, marketers, researchers, policy makers or consumers—reinforces, resists, and reconfigures existing ethical boundaries for what is acceptable and just; in other words, ‘produses’ ethics. I explore four recent public examples to illustrate the power of discourse to shape how we think and respond to everyday technologies. I then make a case for taking proactive stances toward creating better digital futures rather than just letting the future happen to us. As we grow more technologically mediated and digitally saturated, it is particularly important to take ownership of the tough questions, which will allow us to develop our ethical (moral) capacities (sensibilities) to address rising issues of humanity and justice that challenge current legal and regulatory frameworks.

Since launching in May 2005, YouTube has gone from a platform for sharing amateur video content, to the second most popular website in the world (Alexa, 2016). This has enabled content creators to reach followings in their multi-millions, forging lucrative careers through advertising revenue; and consequently sparking the emergence of a new and highly visible form of celebrity.

My research seeks to investigate the challenges popular YouTube vloggers (video bloggers) pose to traditional concepts of celebrity, exploring notions of branding, star image and representation. As part of a multiple-case study approach focusing on three prominent British vloggers, I plan to collect ethnographic data from online forums, social media interactions and YouTube comments; however, this approach is not without its ethical concerns.

The constantly evolving nature of the Internet presents a host of new ethical challenges for researchers, raising questions around what constitutes ‘human’ data (Markham & Buchanan, 2017), what expectations users have around privacy in different online spaces, and when data is considered to be within the public sphere. In this paper I explore some of the ethical issues and dilemmas I am facing whilst preparing to conduct my research. I discuss some of the current debates around ethics in Internet research relating to issues of privacy, confidentiality, anonymity and harm, exploring these in the context of my research. I also draw upon texts from Markham and Buchanan (2012, 2017) and Sveningsson (2009) to discuss some of the key influences that have helped inform my thinking around ethics, as well as the steps I have taken to form my own conclusions and to make decisions that will ensure my research upholds ethical integrity.

The process of studying culture is one of comprehension, encapsulation and control. To say otherwise is to deny our impulses and roles as scholars and scientists. At a very basic level, we go there to learn something about Other and, when we think we have something figured out, we strive to find a good way to tell others what we think we know. To accomplish this goal, we must stop for a moment the flood of experience, extract a sample of it for inspec-tion, and re-present it in academic terms with no small degree of abstraction. Under the conceptual umbrella of text, this article discusses some of the deci-sions we make as researchers representing ourselves and representing others throughout the research project and in our research reports. This paper is based on a talk I gave in 2002 in Trondheim, Norway, at a small conference entitled "Making Common Ground: Methodological and Ethical Issues in Internet Research"

This chapter discusses the main research ethical concerns that arise in internet research and reviews existing research ethical guidance in the Irish context in relation to its application to internet research. The chapter begins with a brief outline of high profile cases in the early history of the internet that highlighted specific emerging ethical concerns regarding the new medium and the first development of ethical guidance in this context. Important research ethical concerns in internet research are then presented. These include: (i) understanding the specific relationship between researchers, participants and the online materials, and the ethical significance of contributors' potential lack of awareness of research conducted on their online interactions, (ii) clarifying privacy expectations and ethical requirements regarding the access to and use of online materials, (iii) implementing ethically appropriate consent processes in the online medium, (iv) doing justice to confidentiality, anonymity and data protection requirements and (v) clarifying vulnerability of participants, and potential risks and benefits arising from research participation. In the final part of the chapter existing Irish research ethical guidance documents are reviewed in relation to the relevance of their guidance for the conduct of internet research.

Early draft of a paper for Rebecca Lind's new edition of Produsing Theory (Peter Lang, forthcoming).  Newer final draft available in academia.edu or here https://www.dropbox.com/s/wdwuhfc41eamix4/MarkhamProdusingEthicsFinalDraft.pdf?dl=0


Here, I offer the lens of remix as a way of taking a future-orientation toward design, research, and everyday living with technology.  This piece continues previous lines of thought about ehics-in-practice, ethics as methods, and emergent ethics in ongoing socio-technical discourses.

The use of the internet by people who use drugs presents an opportunity for researchers not only to successfully recruit drug users to participate in research, but to go further and engage drug users more fully in dialogue. In this paper, we present data arising from a doctoral research project which examines drug use in an internet society by focusing on the experiences of participants in online dance music and drug discussion forums, and we examine the ethical issues and problems that arose in this context due to the illegal and stigmatised status of drug use. We chose to engage with forum moderators and users instead of treating public internet forums as freely available ‘data’. Successes and failures that occurred during this process are outlined, and we discuss what was involved in maintaining the discussion threads once they were accepted and supported by group moderators. Issues that arose in attempting to continue engagement beyond recruitment are also discussed. To conclude the paper, we evaluate our efforts to conduct participatory online research and suggest how other researchers investigating illegal and/or stigmatised behaviours may build on our work.

The use of the Internet by people who use drugs presents an opportunity for researchers not only to successfully recruit drug users to participate in research, but to go further and engage drug users more fully in dialogue. In this paper, we present data arising from a doctoral research project which examines drug use in an Internet society by focusing on the experiences of participants in online dance music and drug discussion forums, and we examine the ethical issues and problems that arose in this context due to the illegal ...

In this chapter, I will explore the unique ethical challenges of a group of social psychological research projects that utilize social media profiles and online dating sites to gather images of faces for use as experimental stimuli (e. studies, images of human faces are selectively downloaded by researchers for use as stimuli in experiments that often ask participants to guess which faces are those of homosexual individuals, and which are those of heterosexual individuals. The images are then kept in databases built to support future research in this area. The use of facial stimuli images in this research raises questions about the ethics of using data that is freely available online, but bound by contextual norms and expectations (Nissenbaum, 2010) about its use. This chapter will outline the procedures of experimental stimuli collection used in these studies, then discuss the ethical challenges that arise in this area of research. The images used in these studies were downloaded by researchers from public profiles on social media and dating sites along with associated metadata related to gender, sexual orientation, and location. Some studies in this field of research do not mention where their experimental stimuli came from, but most do include

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This paper describes how the ethical problems raised by scientific data obtained through harmful and immoral conduct (which, following Stan Godlovitch, is called ill-gotten information) may also emerge in cases where data is collected from the Internet. It describes the major arguments for and against using ill-gotten information in research, and shows how they may be applied to research that either collects information about the Internet itself or which uses data from questionable or unknown sources on the Internet. Three examples (the Internet Census 2012, the PharmaLeaks study, and research into keylogger dropzones) demonstrate how researchers address the ethical issues raised by the sources of data that they use and how the existing arguments concerning the use of ill-gotten information apply to Internet research. The problems faced by researchers who collect or use data from the Internet are shown to be the same problems faced by researchers in other fields who may obtain or use ill-gotten information.

The internet is a frequently used platform for research in pediatric and health psychology. However, there is little pragmatic guidance as to best ethical practice of this research. This absence is particularly prominent for online research with children. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to outline ethical issues in e-health research with children and adolescents through two exemplar studies in pediatric pain research. The first study is an asynchronous message board discussion amongst teenagers with pain who are frequent internet users called Lets Chat Pain. The message board was designed to assess coping responses in those who search for pain information online. The second study is a web-based behavioral intervention for the management of adolescent pain called Web-MAP, delivered to adolescents with chronic pain and their parents. Each exemplar study is discussed in the context of specific ethical considerations related to recruitment, informed consent and debriefing, privacy and confidentiality, and participant safety. Ethical issues regarding evaluation of online psychological interventions are also discussed, and guidance on optimal ethical practice in e-health research is summarized.