Ethical issues of online communication research

Revista de Etica si Deontologie Pro Universitaria, 2022

The proper functioning of a society is based on the existence of moral and ethical norms to guide social behavior. For this reason, different branches of ethics developed to study human behavior, the questions we need to ask when making decisions, the meaning of ethical values, and their role in justifying a decision and guiding our professional activity. Just as research is vital to the development of society and the understanding of social trends, everyday problems, and needs, it seems that research must exist only in the frame of ethics to provide objective knowledge and not harm. However, our rapprochement to the internet in the last 20 years raised new challenges for research ethics, such as: demonstrating the veracity of information without compromising the participants’ identities, defining a community in the online space, etc. In light of these events, our study focuses on the value of ethical behavior in research, examines the contemporary ethical challenges in research, and proposes solutions to address them. For this, we analyze researchers’ behavior online, and its implications in treating the research subjects, defining and choosing the ethical methods to approach them, and the capacity to guarantee the destruction of data. We end this study with a proposal for an ethical model of decision-making in research based on a deontological approach.

Social Networks, 2010

In this paper the need of awareness for and even of change in the rules of how we conduct ourselves as researchers and participants in the virtual worlds of the internet is proposed. The focus of this paper is on the ethics for online research. Our aim is to reignite the discussion about the way the availability and consequent (mis)use of 'social' data, e.g. social network site profiles or newsgroup postings by researchers is about to necessitate a new definition of and fight for the right for a private sphere that each individual may claim in the public of the virtual worlds. We conclude with an approach on how to accomplish that.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012

This article discusses Internet research ethics, which promises to become an ever-more robust and significant field within information ethics, on the one hand, and research ethics more broadly, on the other. As new venues emerge for human–human and human–machine interaction, it seems certain that new ethical conundrums will emerge. But the overall history of Internet research ethics includes at least some convergence on key values and rights, while at the same time preserving important local differences with regard to approaches to ethical decision making and implementation of basic rights and principles – even across East–West divides. This trajectory suggests not the certainty of finding resolutions to every ethical problem that comes along, but rather the sense of finding such resolutions in the face of new difficulties, with sufficient frequency and success to encourage further efforts to do so.

Applied Linguistics Review, 2016

Ethical issues arise at all phases of the research act. However, this article is intended to identify and discuss ethical issues that researchers should consider during the research act at the phase of methodology construction and in the course of data collection. During this phase, researchers must be keenly aware of the experiential dimension of the phenomena they are studying, taking great care not to harm the participants or the context of the research itself. This article explores ethical issues that emerge from the dynamic form of interaction that defines on-line communication. On-line communication is a form of social interaction that is publicly private, anonymous, multiple and simultaneous, and faceless/nonoral. The publicly private nature of on-line interaction necessitates that researchers distinguish between what is "publicly accessible" and "publicly distributed." It must be acknowledged that private interactions persist in spite of public accessibility. The anonymity of on-line interaction is fundamentally different from the anonymity that is prescribed by standards of ethical research, and care must be taken not to confuse the two. The multiple and simultaneous nature of on-line interaction poses logistical difficulties in the acquisition of informed consent. Finally, the faceless and nonoral nature of on-line interaction poses threats of extreme objectification.

2012

Internet-based research methods can include: online surveys, web page content analysis, videoconferencing for online focus groups and/or interviews, analysis of 'e-conversations' through social networking sites, email, chat rooms, discussion boards and/or blogs. Over the last ten years, an upsurge in internet-based research (IBR) has led to increased interest in IBR and research ethics. Here we present some ethical guidelines for IBR while accepting that it would be unrealistic to expect that any single set of guidelines can cover all ethical situations concerning IBR. There is simply too much diversity across internet cultures, values and modes of operation for that to be the case. Perhaps the most useful solution to the complex challenges of IBR lies with a form of 'negotiated ethics', a situated approach grounded in the specifics of the online community, the methodology and the research question(s). This does not mean an 'anything goes' relativist approach, rather an open, pluralistic policy in relation to IBR ethical issues AoIR, 2002).

Qualitative Health Research, 2004

O nline discussion boards have shown great promise for enhancing health service delivery (practitioner-patient communication), consumer health information, and mutual support (patient-patient communication) . As a result, there has been a proliferation of articles in which researchers have used Internet data to understand health behavior and new models of health services has been written about the ethical considerations of developing online health resources for the dual purpose of research and service delivery.

The Internet speaks about our historical way of understanding the world. The nowadays technology is co-constitutive to society. Consequently, all communication takes the form of a technological-mediated-communication, as in the ending years of modernity all 'reality' was taking the form of a written text. For this reason, the ethics of communication has to consider its roots in order to be capable to deal with the ethical problems of computer-mediatedcommunication. I tried to show that digital communication is rooted in the affectedness (Befindlichkeit) of the human being, in his mores. That ground does not require a stable subject, but the character, the embodiment, and the historicity of the user. The ethics is thus an ethics an embodied experience, of user way of being, and of a historical involvement. I try in this paper to disclose the principles that should underlie an ethics of digital communication. J S R I • N o. 13 / Spring 2 0 0 6 works were searching not for news or information but for communication with others.

International Journal of Information Ethics

In the information-technology powered twenty first century a general demand for more effective communication is driving people to question the present, examine the past and to prognosticate the future. The 'unique global media-information system'-the Internet-is the central fact of a vast new complexity of communication (mediated and unmediated) that is driving social-economic-political-religious-technological change (see http://www.5systems.net) at a rate never experienced before. The premise of this paper is that the Internet can be better understood as the first complex global media with both democratic and authoritarian possibilities, the full extent of which are still emergent. In respect of the symposium question, this paper suggests that Internet embedded communication theory can be used progressively as part of a widening and deepening approach to intercultural conversation, dialogue and debate. In theory, the localising nature of the Internet can be read as part of a greater movement towards communitarian and community centred self-governance, local democracy and social self-sufficiency. There is considerable scope for a new theory of society founded in localised 'in-community communication' practice supported by international human rights and effectively responsive to the asymmetric global information environment and congruent with newly democratised local structures of self-governance.