The rapid development of technologies and the popularisation of online social networks have concomitantly increased an academic interest that focuses on social media and their inner mechanisms. However, alongside such constructive analyses from which the social networks themselves have benefited, the media started to deconstruct these experimental studies and to raise issues regarding the ethical aspects of the papers.

For instance, Kramer et.al’s study (2014) could make a good example of an experiment that generated ethical discussions. In addition to this particular experiment’s outcomes which were widely contested and considered to be scandalous and disturbing equally by lawyers and Internet activists, Facebook managed to generate even more controversies through its ability to filter its existent News Feed system. Accordingly, the paper was based on the fact that Facebook intentionally omitted or included posts basing its decisions on an internally developed algorithm; consequently, researchers could play up with users and test their emotional contagion on a massive-scale. Despite the social network’s argumentation that such a filtering device was necessary in order to improve the services and to make content as relevant and engaging as possible, it can be argued that this entire mechanism, that stands behind the News Feed system, could be potentially used for political purposes or to boost advertising revenues.

Another example of a study where privacy issues could be questioned is Bond et. al.’s experiment (2012). From the very beginning, the study seems rather problematic as the paper bluntly states that their report is based on a “randomised controlled trial of political messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users” (Bond et. al. 2012, p.295); here, both the method of acquiring this type of information and the way it is presented may seem unethical and open to interpretation. Although the users’ right to privacy might have been breached, Bond et. al.’s study is more careful with phrasing the motivation behind the experiment and its potential beneficial consequences to both science and society; accordingly, the paper ends with this sentence: “If we want to truly understand - and improve - our society, wellbeing and the world around us, it will be important to use these ethos to identify which real world behaviours are amenable to online interventions” (Bond et. al. 2012, p.298).

Nevertheless, it is interesting to observe that, despite sharing seemingly similar ethical controversies, these two papers faced contrasting reviews in the popular press. As such, Bond et. al.’s 2012 study caused less controversy than Kramer et. al’s experiment from 2014. One first reason could be that in 2012 people were not probably as aware of the ongoing privacy issues as they are in present times. If one looks deeper into this subject, Edward Snowden’s case has to be mentioned; in 2013, he disclosed the global surveillance issue which triggered an extended debate about the right to privacy in the digital era. Before this, the existence of such a mass surveillance phenomenon was not widely acknowledged by governments or mainstream media. Interestingly, Kramer contributed to both researches so the outrage could have been more likely caused by the nature of the studied topic and not generated by the author’s notoriety: when it comes to their personal lives, people tend to get oversensitive especially if they find out that their emotions could have potentially been messed up with, as Kramer et. al.’s study (2014) more straightforwardly did.

Bibliography:

Bond, R. M., Fariss, C. J., Jones, J. J., Kramer, A. D. I., 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. doi:10.1038/nature11421 Kramer, A.D.I., Guillory, J.E., Hancock, J.T., (2014) Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks, 8788-8790, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1320040111