With its wealth of readily and often publicly available information about Web users' lives, the Web has created new opportunities for conducting online research. Although digital data are easily accessible, ethical guidelines are inconsistent about how researchers should use them. Some academics claim that traditional ethical principles are sufficient and applicable to online research. However, the Web poses new challenges that compel researchers to reconsider concerns of consent, privacy and anonymity. Based on doctoral research into the investigation of online medicine purchasing, this article presents a case study involving online forums, and reviews the existing ethical guidance surrounding the Web. The suggestion is that new ethical guidelines, particularly in relation to informed consent and participants' own perceptions of what is public or private, are needed owing to the unique challenges of online research.
This article seeks to establish the connection—via shared discourse—between Incels and mainstream pornography. With an interdisciplinary approach which involves a Corpus Linguistics analysis of Reddit forum data, research into digital behaviors, and a feminist critique, this article focuses on the commonalities between the language of pornography and that of Incels. In doing so, it demonstrates how both pornography and Incels are different manifestations of the same misogyny. The findings of this study highlight the normalization of violence against women (VAW), which continues to be endemic in society, enabled and exacerbated by contemporary technologies.
The reform of the Crime Survey of England and Wales (a national victim survey) has exposed a very high number of individuals who fall victim to computer misuse cybercrimes such as hacking, computer viruses and ransomware. These crimes receive very little attention from the criminal justice system and very few are brought to justice, partly because of the nature of them (global crimes), but also because of a lack of capability among the police. This paper draws on official statistics, an empirical survey and interview research with computer misuse victims. The paper juxtaposes the low priority and lack of resources given to this crime by political and police leaders against many victims’ perceptions and experiences of the crime as equivalent if not more serious than physical counterparts such as burglary, where there is greater interest. The increasing prominence of the virtual world in human life and the impacts of these crimes call for a reappraisal of the official assessment of seriousness in order to raise the priority and increase the capacity of criminal justice towards such offences.
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