Informed, Uninformed and Participative Consent in Social Media Research

Abstract

The use of online data is becoming increasingly essential for the generation of insight in today's research environment. This reflects the much wider range of data available online and the key role that social media now plays in interpersonal communication. However, the process of gaining permission to use social media data for research purposes creates a number of significant issues when considering compatibility with professional ethics guidelines. This paper critically explores the application of existing informed consent policies to social media research and compares with the form of consent gained by the social networks themselves, which we label ‘uninformed consent’. We argue that, as currently constructed, informed consent carries assumptions about the nature of privacy that are not consistent with the way that consumers behave in an online environment. On the other hand, uninformed consent relies on asymmetric relationships that are unlikely to succeed in an environment based on co-creation of value. The paper highlights the ethical ambiguity created by current approaches for gaining customer consent, and proposes a new conceptual framework based on participative consent that allows for greater alignment between consumer privacy and ethical concerns.

Marketing Brexit: An exploratory study of young voter engagement in relation to the EU referendum

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Participatory New Product Development–A Framework for Deliberately Collaborative and Continuous Innovation Design

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Mining social media data: How are research sponsors and researchers addressing the ethical challenges?

“…Arguably, however, the greatest challenges for researchers in this area are ethical ones (David, 2004; Eysenbach and Till, 2001), such as variable perceptions of and unclear boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces, as well as the difficulty of ensuring anonymity and preserving the privacy of data subjects, whose identities may not be disguised or may be easily deduced from their postings and affiliations. Related issues of ownership and intellectual property are also poorly defined and consent to the use of social media data in research is rarely obtained through informed choice, but rather assumed on the basis that users have chosen to place it in the public domain (Koene and Adolphs, 2015; McKee, 2013; Munson et al, 2013; Nunan and Yenicioglu, 2013; Orton-Johnson, 2010; Vayena et al, 2012). Awareness of the potential privacy implications of sharing personal information on social media is growing, driven by newsworthy cases such as Facebook’s experiments in emotion manipulation (Jouhki et al, 2016) and its identification of ‘vulnerable’ teenagers for advertisers (Pells, 2017), or the use of social media by data analytics companies seeking insights into citizens’ political attitudes and networks, to influence voter behaviour (Fromm, 2016; Arthur, 2010).…”