7.5 Critical-Realist Social Media Research Ethics
Critical digital methods challenge digital positivism. In this context, also ethical questions arise. All critical theories are inherently ethico-political. They reject the assumption that academic knowledge can be value neutral, and argue that all social construction of knowledge reflects power and norms and is therefore political. One of the critical theory’s tasks is to lay open and criticise the ideologies inherent in specific knowledge. Critical theory’s own knowledge is aimed at contributing to a better understanding of society’s power contradictions and how to overcome them in order to create a better world.
But there is not just the role of ethics in research but also the ethics of conducting research. Research ethics concern issues, such as privacy, anonymity, informed consent, and the sensitivity of data. Given that social media is part of society’s tendency to liquefy and blur the boundaries between the private and the public, labour/leisure, production/consumption (Fuchs 2015a, chapter 8), research ethics in social media research is particularly complex. The complexity and confusion resulting from Internet research are, for example, evident in the British Sociological Association’s Statement of Ethical Practice. It is very unspecific about Internet research ethics, arguing that one should “take special care when carrying out research via the Internet” and be “familiar with ongoing debates on the ethics of Internet research” (British Sociological Association, 2002, §41). Zimmer and Proferes (2014) analysed 382 academic works that studied Twitter data. One hundred and sixty-eight (44.0%) analysed more than 100,000 tweets, and 216 more than 10,000 (56.5%). Only 4% (16) discussed ethical aspects.
Social media research ethics face a contradiction between big data positivism and research ethics fundamentalism. Big data positivists tend to say, “Most social media data is public data. It is like data in a newspaper. I can therefore gather big data without limits. Those talking about privacy want to limit the progress of social science”. This position disregards any engagement with ethics and has a bias towards quantification. The ethical framework Social Media Research: A Guide to Ethics (Townsend and Wallace 2016) that emerged from an ESRC-funded project tries to avoid both extremes and to take a critical-realist position: it recommends that social scientists neither ignore nor fetishise research ethics when studying digital media.
Chapter Seven | Digital Positivism and Administrative
187
Critical-Realist Social Media Research Ethics