A presentation aimed at postgraduates on how to navigate the murky waters of ethics committees and social media research.

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‘Damn those ethics
boards!’ How to make
sense of an ethics
committee approach
towards social media
researchDr Jonathon Hutchinson
Department of Media and Communication
@dhutchman
University of Waikato, New Zealand
22 November, 2016

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What is public and private data in social media
research?

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Can I just scrape this data without ethics
approval?

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Are the participants aware I’m tracking and
analysing them?

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What sorts of projects
are people working
on in here that
incorporate social
media?

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This is not a ‘beat-down’ session on ethics
boards. Rather, I wish to highlight the sorts
of issues they face when we put
applications through.

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Case Study 1: Moving Media

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Case Study 2: Public Service Media

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Case Study 3: #airbnb

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Work flow for digital media methods research:
Platform Application Program Interface (API) >
Harvesting tool (TCAT, Netvizz or similar) >
Data cleaning (typically Excel or Open Refine) >
Analysis and visualisation (Gephi, Tableau, etc).

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Margaret Faedo, Director of Research Integrity,
University of Sydney

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Global Ethical
Approach

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United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his
privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks
upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to
the protection of the law against such interference or
attacks.
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf

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National Ethical
Approach

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National Statement on Ethical Conduct in
Human Research (2007) – The National
Statement
1. Values and principles of ethical conduct: Research merit
and integrity; Justice; Beneficence; Respect
2. Themes in research ethics: risk and benefit, consent: do
the benefits outweigh the risks?
3. Ethical considerations specific to research methods
or fields.
4. Ethical considerations specific to participants
(pregnancy, age, relationships, disability, cultural
background)
5. Process of research governance and ethical review –
(HREC).https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/research/responsible-conduct-research/summary-national-statement-content

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University Ethical Approach

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USyd Human Research Ethics Committee
(HREC)
Objectives
1. Protect the mental and physical welfare, rights, dignity and safety of
participants of research involving humans, their data or human tissue
(‘research’).
2. Promote ethical standards of research.
3. Facilitate ethical research through efficient and effective review
processes, in accordance with the National Statement on Ethical
Conduct in Human Research (2007) (‘National Statement’).
4. Protecting the University’s reputation as a place of ethical research by
reviewing research undertaken by its employees, affiliates and
students to promote compliance with the National Statement and
associated legislations and guidelines.
5. Review research applications with the intention of identifying potential
safety concerns for University of Sydney staff and student researchers
while conducting research.
http://sydney.edu.au/dam/corporate/documents/research/human-ethics-committee-terms-reference-56kb.pdf

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A Disciplinary
Approach – Critical
Internet Studies

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Association of Internet Researcher (AoIR) – 6
key guiding principles
1. The greater the vulnerability of the community / author /
participant, the greater the obligation of the researcher
to protect the community / author / participant.
2. Because ‘harm’ is defined contextually, ethical principles
are more likely to be understood inductively rather than
applied universally. That is, rather than one-size-fits-all
pronouncements, ethical decision-making is best
approached through the application of practical
judgment attentive to the specific context (what Aristotle
identified as phronesis4).
http://aoir.org/ethics/

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Association of Internet Researcher (AoIR) – 6
key guiding principles
3. Because all digital information at some point involves
individual persons, consideration of principles related to
research on human subjects may be necessary even if
it is not immediately apparent how and where persons
are involved in the research data.
4. When making ethical decisions, researchers must
balance the rights of subjects (as authors, as research
participants, as people) with the social benefits of
research and researchers’ rights to conduct research. In
different contexts the rights of subjects may outweigh
the benefits of research.http://aoir.org/ethics/

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Association of Internet Researcher (AoIR) – 6
key guiding principles
5. Ethical issues may arise and need to be addressed
during all steps of the research process, from planning,
research conduct, publication, and dissemination.
6. Ethical decision-making is a deliberative process, and
researchers should consult as many people and
resources as possible in this process, including fellow
researchers, people participating in or familiar with
contexts/sites being studied, research review boards,
ethics guidelines, published scholarship (within one’s
discipline but also in other disciplines), and, where
applicable, legal precedent.http://aoir.org/ethics/

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So Now What?

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Distributed Morality
In distributed environments, Luciano Floridi argues ‘good’
actions can be aggregated and ‘bad’ actions can be
fragmented, but the interdependent operation of moral
agents means that the ethical impacts of any actions need
to be evaluated in terms of the consequences for systemic
and individual well-being.

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Distributed Responsibility
Charles Ess (2013) describes ‘distributed responsibility’
across a network as “the understanding that, as these
networks make us more and more interwoven with and
interdependent upon one another, the ethical responsibility
for a given act is distributed across a network of actors, not
simply attached to a single individual” (p. xii).

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So this is the solution:
Make everyone in the network responsible
for looking out for each other to some
extent?
This doesn’t always work, and in fact can
be detrimental to the network participants.

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Hong Kong Umbrella Protest (Sinpeng, 2015)

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Thailand’s Political Unrest (Sinpeng, 2015)

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ISIS

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Social Visibility in
Networks

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Hashtag Networks – Social Visibility
– Users engage in particular social and cultural practices,
such as including hashtags in the comments
– This can be for a variety of reasons, including greater
distribution in ‘digital influencer’ (Abidin, 2016) networks
– While this is useful in some spaces, it is not others (for
example revenge porn or doxing)
– It is the currency in which many social media users use
to promote their products, political allegiance, or civil
disobedience

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‘The cost of this creativity, sharing and visibility
is that the user loses control over what is done
with their personal information, loses control
over the new contexts into which others may
share it, and loses control over to whom the
social media firms might sell it’.
Graham Meikle, 2016, (p. x).

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How do we approach ethical
research on social media?

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Conclusions – For Researchers
– Network actors have differing amounts of agency
– Ethical approaches need to remain fluid, like T&C’s
– Distributed responsibility is useful as a framework, but it
is not the answer
– Complex commercial social media environments are
outside of nation state regulation
– The onus falls back to the individual researcher and
ethics committee – AoIR guide becomes crucial here

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Conclusions – For Ethics Boards
– The need to understand the public vs. private ideas of
social media better
– Embody an active role in the research until its
completion

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Dr Jonathon Hutchinson
Department of Media and
Communication
jonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au
@dhutchman