Very nice topic dear Prof. João Batista Ferreira, thanks a lot.

Of course, yes, according to my experience on RG-Platform, I was able to publish two articles based on the views, experiences and advice made by my respected colleagues on this Platform. Praise be to God for every thing.

I also take this opportunity to advise my colleagues to take into account the experts' opinions/suggestions in order to develop their capabilities.

Regards

This is a question I am pondering at the moment as I have an idea for an article based on Social Media.

The answer, I believe, lies in what kind of information is being collected.

I have another project in mind which will not collect personal information and gaining signed consent would be cumbersome for the participants. And I do not intend to collect names, only the survey form. In that case I intend to make participation voluntary, with the survey headed "Your completion and return of this survey indicates your consent for this information to be used" or something similar.

If you are doing a survey then this idea could be useful.

However, your question indicates you intend to collect more detailed information does that include names? And do you intend to use the names in your research report? If so, you need to collect some form of consent.

It can be argued that much of social media is in the public domain and therefore available for use. But this is not always the case in arenas such as Facebook, where some sites are restricted to friends, or are moderated and participation is approved. These arenas present a different issue, as they are not in the public domain.

I think I need more specific information about your project to make any further suggestions.

You could publish on social media that you are going to analyze a certain topic there and ask if there is anyone who objects to this

You can make good contribution.

Very nice topic dear Prof. João Batista Ferreira, thanks a lot.

Of course, yes, according to my experience on RG-Platform, I was able to publish two articles based on the views, experiences and advice made by my respected colleagues on this Platform. Praise be to God for every thing.

I also take this opportunity to advise my colleagues to take into account the experts' opinions/suggestions in order to develop their capabilities.

Regards

Yes

In my opinion, information contained in posts, posts, comments on social media portals can be used as research material, which can be used for scientific research if appropriate standards of ethics and personal data protection are maintained.

More and more technology and marketing companies acquire information from entries, posts, comments posted by Internet users, including users of social media portals.

The information collected from these sources from these websites is aggregated in Big Data database systems and processed mainly for the purpose of their use in the marketing activity of a given technology company or for the needs of other companies that are its clients.

In the context of the information downloaded in this way and their use for commercial purposes, a question arises regarding the ethics of this activity.

In my opinion to ethically use the discussions, content of entries, posts posted on social media portals, it is necessary to obtain and process this scientific data using the principle of anonymity of aggregation and data processing for the needs of research, use an objective research approach, comply with applicable ethics standards of research and in accordance with applicable law.

Please reply. I invite you to the discussion

Greetings Dariusz Prokopowicz

Your point about companies collecting data from social media is well made, and interesting. I too wonder about the ethics of this, especially in the light of the US election scandal around exactly that issue - and the targeting of people with various types of spin.

I think you are right about research on sociall media if the information is used anonymously. In the paper I am considering I need to be able to cite specific arguments on the net to show the deterioration from reasoned argument to personal attacks. In this case I can retype the argument leaving out the names. The issue then moves to one of citing sources. A screenshot with the names subsequently removed would probably be better - but does not completely resolve the issue of citing sources.

In general, where the research is about people (I suggest that my piece does not focus on 'people' but rather the political and social context) I think that the discussion needs to go deeper into what we mean by "appropriate standards of ethics" as it applies to such research.

What are those standards?

Thank you all for the postings !!!

I have the intention of following the lead of anonymity, as approached by Dariusz Prokopowicz taking into account the ethical standards that I respect and put into practice. Completely different from a political dispute, where Fake News are used and interfere in the results, they are not fought and much less penalized who do them.

The ethics of scientific research is constant and can not be changed by changing the tool or method of data collection. It is nirmal that data is collected through social networks

Greetings.

There are several points I would add to this discussion.

First of all, let me outline my position. While I began my academic work in science, I quickly moved to Philosophy. I retain only a passing reading interest in science, and I would describe my current work as inter-disciplinary, with Philosophy at the core, where my current interest lies in Epistemology and Ethics.

Second, there is no single unified ethics. There are seven or eight major ethical systems that people subscribe to, each one with a different starting point. The most obvious differences are between Religious Ethics and those which do not reference any sort of God/s. This piece lays out some of the ethical implications in different ethical systems.

Here we can clearly see that Ethics are interwoven with Ontologies i.e. If a God exists then it is imperative that we follow his instructions. If there is no God then ethics are interwoven with what a human being is. I’m basically an Existentialist – and my own ethics revolve around authenticity as a person. Ethics are always personal, never collective. To conform to a collective ethics is to give away authenticity. This means that the ethical principles I hold are put into practice in every life situation – and can loosely be categorized as situational ethics. This does not mean that my ethical principles change, but I consider the situation I am in, what are my intentions, what are my proposed actions and what outcome do I expect.

If my own ethics conflict with any institutional ethics, then I follow my own ethics. If I disagree with ethical requirements placed on my research I simply do not carry out the research. To give in to imposed ethics is to be inauthentic.

Third, Generally, we judge a person’s ethics in three places – their intentions, their action and the outcome. Good intentions can lead to bad outcomes. The statement “the ends justify the means” is a statement that links the intention and outcomes, ignoring the actions. This has been used to justify scientific research, such as vivisection on animals and humans, actions which most of us would agree are unethical. Though it is clear that the people carrying out such research did not consider them, at the time, to be unethical.

Salam Jassim Hmood. I am unsure how to respond to you. Clearly, my points above respond to your suggestion that ethics are unchanging and cannot be changed by changing the tools or data collection method. My response is that ethics are not unified to start with.

I am not clear what you mean by Scientific Research. Are you contrasting this to research in the Social Sciences and Humanities, where Joao’s research is more likely to be situated, are you referring to scientific research as Quantitative or biological, such as Medical Research, or are you referring to ‘scientific’ research as rigorous research, which may or may not include some research approaches of Social Sciences and the Humanities, which may be Qualitative research. Each one involves different ethics.

back to the question

Joao Batista Ferreira’s question says I am an ethical person, and intend to act in an ethical way – in a scenario what actions should I follow? This focuses us onm the actions part of the trio Intentions/Actions/Outcomes.

As has been said in many places, science and its products race ahead of ethics. So how we use the Internet and social media and what are the ethics involved is an important, indeed vital, discussion. This small discussion is located within that wider discussion.

The recent exposure of the collection of data by Facebook without the knowledge of the participants is the point of Dariusz Propokowicz, not the political scandal of the attempt to influence the election – the first action (collecting data) is relevant here, not the second (influencing the election or not) is placed in a differing context – that of ethical actions in a democracy. The ethics the first action exposes is that of knowledge of participation, the protection of the research participants and the distribution of the data to a third party.. We are not aware that we are participants in research when we use social media like Facebook. This is the core of the issue.

In the first instance, the question is whether a person knows they are a participant in research. Facebook appears to be contradicting that principle by collecting data without people knowing.

Sitting alongside that is that many people consider social media to be a public discussion forum. It is not. It is run by private companies who make money by selling access to audiences to advertisers. Facebook, for instance, has the ability to identify, through data collection, to identify specific audiences and target advertising and posts to those audiences.

As this is an operation of Power there are ethical considerations.

Joao Batista Ferreira’s question focuses us further on the ethical research principle of protection the participants and to focus on the issue of informed consent. Protection of the individual is wider than just that principles and includes issues of privacy and physical harm. How do we act (conduct the research) to gather data and to protect privacy.

Here, the scenario is that Informed Consent is impossible. The question focuses us on whether it is ethical to carry out the survey, and if the answer is Yes, then how? What actions?

The intention is clear - to behave in an ethical fashion, and we are entitled assume that the outcome is ethical – in that it enhances human knowledge, and in terms of Aristotelian ethics, leads to human flourishing. It can also be seen as ethical in the contexts of Communitarian ethics (David Hume) as the new knowledge will benefit the community. Indigenous ethics can be likened to both Communitarian and Aristotelian Ethics

Privacy may not be an issue in the ethics of Selfishness (Ayn Rand) where the driving principle is to act in ways that benefit us personally. (e.g. a requirement of the job is to research and publish so we can gather data to fulfill that aim, a selfish one, ignoring the interests of others in privacy and protection). I do not agree with Rand, and I hope that all who read this do not agree with the ethics of Selfishness.

Privacy is also an issue in Indigenous ethics, linked to the issue of plagiarism. Indigenous knowledge is linked to narratives – the oral traditions, which are the narrated experiences of lived individuals (note the link to Existentialism.) Here, the authority of a person to speak, and therefore the validity of their knowledge as told in narratives is based on their position within a community – which speaks to western concepts of citing sources.

As well, there is a growing discussion that when stories are collected people want to be named. This is to stop others claiming the stories as their own. This approach has arisen in other medical research and Indigenous research. This presents an Indigenous variant on the western concept of plagiarism.

It becomes clear, then, that to make suggestions on actions requires a more detailed information on what data is being collected.

Because the actual data to be collected is not given, I would apply the general principle that, if it is collected without informed consent, then the information published must not be able to be used to identify the actual participants. Indeed any data which is collected must not be able to identify the participants in any way. This does limit the data that can be collected.

Enough. Please respond. This is an important discussion.

Ian Stuart brilliant reviews.

Direct quotes need individual consent. Aggregated, non-individualized opinions need permission from the social media administrator.

Greetings Mary.

I am unsure why you say that and I would value your expansion of that answer.

I am thinking about an article about the internet and its impacts on democracy, especially the level of verbal violence, the political verbal warfare on social media such as Facebook and how that impacts on actual violence.

Of course, these are not rally verbal exchanges, but rather are written. The concept of the violence of these exchanges is the point. I use the word 'verbal' in a very wide sense, and also acknoweldge (an importatn point) that these exchanges are less likely to occur if people were talking to each other face to face.

Such an article would require specific examples quoted from exchanges to show the verbal violence, amongst other things.

It would not be difficult to take some of these verbal exchanges, remove all names or any reference to specific web pages and social media sites, and thus protect the anonymity and privacy of the individuals involved. Such examples would, of course, have to be used which did not provide any individual or personal information, and would not identify the participants in any way.

This is not difficult to achieve.

So, protecting the privacy of individuals is a major consideration and would be achieved.

Protecting the personal information of participants (again, I use this word loosely because of its ethical role in research rather than the actual participation of any person - as they are not participating in any real sense) would also be achieved.

My last point is that we have no guarantee that people on social media are who they claim to be. Anyone can sign on to social media such as Facebook using false names, and create a persona that only has a vague resemblance to who they are in the real world. This adds a level of complexity to concepts of privacy and protection of the individual.

So, igiventhat scenario, I would really appreciate further discussion with you.

Scientific and social networks help in the refinement of research ideas as well as studies and discussions of projects by good percentage and facilitate the access of sources

Ian - it's difficult to figure out who owns the written information on social media sites. It is not copyrighted so, theoretically, it belongs to readers. But I still think it's wise to get an administrator's okay before using it. It shouldn't be hard to get. With respect to verbatim quotes, the writer and perhaps the writer's correspondents would recognize the source, or might recognize the source, so again, I think it's wisest to get the writer's okay. In practice, it would be up to the scientist's Ethics Committee to decide - different committees would probably give different answers.

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