Ethical considerations in an online community: the balancing act

Abstract

With the emergence and rapid growth of Social Media, a number of government departments in several countries have embraced Social Media as a privilege channel to interact with their constituency. We are exploring, in collaboration with the Australian Department of Human Services, the possibility to exploit the potential of social networks to support specific groups of citizens. To this end, we have developed Next Step, an online community to help people currently receiving welfare payments find a job and become financially self-sufficient. In this paper, we explore some ethical issues that arise when governments engage directly with citizens, in particular with communities in difficult situations, and when researchers are involved. We describe some of the challenges we faced and how we addressed them. Our work highlights the complexity of the problem, when an online community involves a government department and a welfare recipient group with a dependency relationship with that department. It becomes a balancing act, with the need to ensure privacy of the community members whilst still fulfilling the government's legal responsibilities. While difficult, these issues must be addressed if governments are to engage with their citizens using Social Media.

Behavior‐Based Propagation of Trust in Social Networks with Restricted and Anonymous Participation

“…Not only do they participate in the community anonymously, but also they are invited to participate in the community in a privacy‐preserving way. Further details on the privacy‐preserving protocols and characteristics of the community can be found in Paris et al (). Furthermore, the community is monitored by moderators to ensure that the members’ behaviors in the community follow the agreed terms and conditions.…”

“…In this context, unlike in e‐commerce sites, a major concern is one of fairness: All citizens have to be treated equally, making it impossible to provide tangible incentives to encourage participation (Paris et al ). While, in commercial sites, incentives can be offered to encourage people to join and be highly active (e.g., they might be given a voucher or loyalty points toward the purchase of a product), we could not give any tangible benefits (whether monetary, informational or in terms of treatment) in our context for fairness reasons.…”

“…Membership to the community was by invitation only, to target a specific group. Using a double‐blind process for both ethical and privacy considerations (Paris et al ), individuals received a unique token to join. No one could create several identities in the community to manipulate the community.…”

Studying attitudes towards vaccine hesitance and California law SB 277 in online discourse: A dataset and methodology

“…As such, hundreds of ordinary citizens’ legal names are present in the full dataset, in whole or in part, with no reliable (or practical) way to obtain informed consent for their use. Furthermore, even people who use “screen names” or other anonymous handles online may have a long-term attachment to a particular digital identity; thus, including even obviously fake names in a dataset intended for public use is not necessarily much more ethical than including their legal identities [8] .…”

Rules, Prudence and Public Value: Public Servants and Social Media in Comparative Perspective

“…The rise and rise of social media has generated increasing academic attention over the past half-decade. The literature on how governments can or should use social media has largely focused on questions around how they can best be utilized to better connect citizens with their governments (see Chadwick 2011 for a summary of this literature; Bertot et al 2012; Kavanaugh et al 2012; Paris et al 2013). This has been coupled with a consideration of how far public servants can use social media to make personal political comments outside the workplace (e.g.…”