Ethical norms and issues in crowdsourcing practices: A Habermasian analysis

Abstract

Crowdsourcing practices have generated much discussion on their ethics and fairness, yet these topics have received little scholarly investigation. Some have criticized crowdsourcing for worker exploitation and for undermining workplace regulations. Others have lauded crowdsourcing for enabling workers' autonomy and allowing disadvantaged people to access previously unreachable job markets. In this paper, we examine the ethics in crowdsourcing practices by focusing on three questions: (a) What ethical issues exist in crowdsourcing practices? (b) are ethical norms emerging or are issues emerging that require ethical norms? and, more generally, (c) how can the ethics of crowdsourcing practices be established? We answer these questions by engaging with Jürgen Habermas' discourse ethics theory to interpret findings from a longitudinal field study (from 2013 to 2016) involving key crowdsourcing participants (workers, platform organizers, and requesters) of three crowdsourcing communities. Grounded in this empirical study, we identify ethical concerns and discuss the ones for which ethical norms have emerged as well as others which remain unresolved and problematic in crowdsourcing practices. Furthermore, we provide normative considerations of how ethical concerns can be identified, discussed, and resolved based on the principles of discourse ethics.

Reliability of crowdsourcing as a method for collecting emotions labels on pictures

“…The task design is based on the instructions and emotion collection methods used in the original IAPS study but adapted to the crowdsourcing environment and ethics [9]. In this sense, and unlike the original IAPS, the annotation task was divided in three pages of 20 pictures each, and workers could decide how many pages to label (min 1 page with 20 pictures).…”

Crowdsourcing for Online Samples in Counseling Research

“…Counseling researchers using crowdsourcing platforms should make an effort to understand the mechanics of incentives. There are a variety of ethical dilemmas surrounding crowdsourced workers, such as appropriate payment, protection of workers, and the boundaries and scope of crowdsourced work (Schlagwein et al, 2019). Some platform organizations, such as Qualtrics, determine the incentives as a part of the consultation process with a third-party firm; thus, researchers do not have control over how much participants are paid (Boas et al, 2020).…”

Critically studying openness: A way forward

“…In the third paper, “Ethical norms and issues in crowdsourcing practices: A Habermasian analysis,” Schlagwein, Cecez‐Kecmanovic, and Hanckel () explore the ethics in crowdsourcing practices. They motivate their research based on the increasing significance of the crowdsourcing work practice and its competition with more traditional and established practices.…”

“…Schlagwein et al () contribute with a rich case study illustrating ethical concerns, and provide normative considerations of how ethical concerns can be identified, discussed, and resolved using the principles of discourse ethics. They further contribute by improving our understanding of ethical issues within crowdsourcing work practices and they suggest normative ethical guidelines on how to address current and future ethical issues.…”