This document discusses the ethics of conducting internet research. It begins with an introduction to ethical frameworks like Kant versus Mill and discusses challenges like ensuring anonymity, informed consent, and avoiding harm when directly interacting with individuals online. It also addresses analyzing interactions in virtual environments and issues around privacy, identity disclosure, and data capture. Big data research ethics are covered, including issues of total knowledge, manipulation, and the difference between academic and commercial contexts. The document emphasizes the importance of sensitivity to context, not overburdening participants, taking responsibility, and writing transparently about ethical decision making in internet research.

1. The Ethics of Internet
Research
Rebecca Eynon & Ralph Schroeder
7th July 2014
SDP

2. Overview
• An introduction to ethics: Kant versus Mill
• Context specific examples
– Gathering data directly from individuals
– Analyzing interaction in virtual environments
– Conducting Big Data research
• What is new?
• Your ethical questions

3. An introduction to ethics
• Kant versus Mill
• Historical abuses

4. Gathering data directly from
individuals
Protection of harm
– More difficult to assess
– Strategies (make it clear participants can leave, prior rapport
with participant, establishing netiquette)
Ensuring anonymity and confidentiality
– Perceived anonymity of the Internet
– To be considered at all stages of the research
Informed consent
– Distance between researcher & participant, challenges
anonymity strategies, verifying ability to give informed consent
– Strategies (email discussion, readability of documents, use of
quizzes, recruitment strategy and verifying identity)

5. Analyzing Interaction in
Virtual Environments
• Focus on graphical online spaces with avatar
interaction
• Differences in text-only versus voice
communication, video- versus virtual, etc.
• Contexts of use include online gaming, spaces
for socializing and collaborating, training online
for offline tasks, experimenting in virtual

6. Research on VEs: Contexts and
the role of the Researcher
• Contact people offline?
– Weigh burden on research participant
• The online social setting: formally public, but
respect the conventions for the privacy of the
space?
– Be sensitive to context
• Disclose researcher identity?
– Online possibilities are different from offline (ID tag)
• ‘Invasion’ of researchers
– Respect social milieu

7. Research on VEs: Data Capture
• Tools for capture are more powerful than for
capturing offline interactions
• Anonymous data about populations, but
surveillance?
• Reproducing and anonymizing captured
interactions, but possible identification by
search?

8. Research in Online Worlds
• Maintaining the trust of environments and
avatars and the persons ‘behind them’
• New possibilities for the study of social
interaction in online worlds and VEs
– Virtual Milgram as example
• A balance of deontological and utilitarian
research ethics

10. Virtual and other Online
Environments
• Environments for Being There Together
(experiments)
• Online Networks (online to offline identification,
surveillance)
• Ethnographic and participant observation
• Large-scale data capture, blurring of
commercial boundaries
• From virtual to real behaviour modification

11. The Ethics of Big Data Research
• Objects with ‘total’ knowledge (universes) – Danger is inferring
behaviour not of individuals, but of classes of people
• Asymmetry of knower and the subjects of knowledge is greater than
elsewhere
• Unawareness of peoples’ and own behaviour– Hence only utilitarian,
not Kantian justification?
• Why does prediction or uncovering laws of behaviour ‘grate’?
• Benefits: greater scientific power and more specific details
• Relation to smaller data? ‘Creep’
• Compare with Mayer-Schoenberger and Cukier (political and
commercial harms of wrong knowledge) or boyd and Crawford
(knowledge is always already political and economic, so therefore
also suspect epistemologically)
• Solution: ethical = greater researcher and public awareness,
regulatory (but this would not apply to academic researchers?) =
prevent legal and specific harms

12. Facebook ‘emotional contagion’
study
• Three issues: research ethics, legal, and scientific
‘manipulation’
• Research ethics IRB’s apply to academic research
• Legal issues are covered by ‘terms of service’
• Scientific ‘manipulation’ is a product of big data
• Sources:
– Kramer, Adam; Guillory, Jamie and Hancock, Jeffrey.
2014. Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional
contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 111 (24), 8788-90.
– http://laboratorium.net/archive/2014/06/30/the_facebook_e
motional_manipulation_study_source

13. What is new?
• Ethical governance in traditional research settings
– Institutional vs individual responsibility
• Challenges in devising a code of practice in a global
context
• Disciplinary boundaries
• Less well known implications
• Characteristics of data
– Abundance, distance between creator of data
and researcher, data as a “commodity”
• Differences between ethical and legal provisions

14. On ethical decision-making
• “At its most fundamental level, we recognise that ethical
decision making interweaves one’s fundamental world
view, one’s academic and political environment, one’s
defining disciplinary assumptions, and one’s
methodological stances. Decision making occurs at
many junctures in the cycle of inquiry, including research
design, research conduct and research production and
dissemination.” (AoIR, 2012:3)

15. Key considerations
1. Human subjects vs humanities model of ethics
2. Sensitivity to context & participants
– Private vs public
3. Ethical standpoints can change throughout the
research
4. Protect - not burden - participants
5. Take responsibility for ethical and research
choices
6. Do meaningful & high quality research
7. Write about ethical decision making

16. • Your ethical questions........& potential
strategies

17. Further references
• Bond, R. M., Fariss, C. J., Jones, J. J., Kramer, A. D., Marlow, C., Settle, J. E., & Fowler, J.
H. (2012). A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization.
Nature, 489(7415), 295-298.
• Ess, C. (2006) ‘Ethics and the Use of the Internet in Social Science Research’. In: Adam
Joinson, Katelyn McKenna, Tom Postmes and Ulf-Dietrich Reips (eds) Oxford Handbook of
Internet Psychology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. pp 487-503.
• Kramer, A. D., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-
scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, 201320040.
• Pittenger, D. (2003) Internet Research: An Opportunity to Revisit Classic Ethical Problems
in Behavioural Research, Ethics and Behaviour, 13(1): 45-60
• Schroeder, R. (2007) ‘An Overview of Ethical and Social Issues in Shared Virtual
Environments’, Futures: The Journal of Forecasting, Planning and Policy, 39 (6): 704-717
• Stern, S. (2003) ‘Encountering distressing information online research: a consideration of
legal and ethical responsibilities’, New Media and Society, 5(2): 249-266
• Varnhagen, C., Gushta, M., Daniels, J., Peters, T., Parmar, N., Law, D., Hirsch, R., Takach,
B., and Johnson, T. (2005) ‘How informed is online consent?’ Ethics and Behaviour, (15)1:
37-48
• Zimmer, M. (2010) ‘‘But the data is already public’’: on the ethics of research in Facebook.
Ethics and Information Technology, 12(4), 313-325