Public attitudes towards social media field experiments.
Ethics
Field experiments
Public attitudes
Social media
Survey
Journal
Scientific reports
ISSN: 2045-2322
Titre abrégé: Sci Rep
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101563288
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
30 10 2024
30 10 2024
Historique:
received:
27
03
2024
accepted:
17
10
2024
medline:
31
10
2024
pubmed:
31
10
2024
entrez:
31
10
2024
Statut:
epublish
Résumé
The growing use of social media field experiments demands a rethink of current research ethics in computational social science and psychological research. Here, we provide an exploratory empirical account of key user concerns and outline a number of critical discussions that need to take place to protect participants and help researchers to make use of the novel opportunities of digital data collection and field studies. Our primary contention is that we need to elicit public perceptions to devise more up-to-date guidelines for review boards whilst also allowing and encouraging researchers to arrive at more ethical individual study design choices themselves. To ground our discussion in real-world examples of online experiments, we focus on recent social media studies in the field of misinformation, polarization, and hate speech research. We conclude by discussing how we can better strike a balance between meeting ethical guidelines and the concerns of social media users alongside maximizing scientific impact and credibility.
Identifiants
pubmed: 39478029
doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-76948-z
pii: 10.1038/s41598-024-76948-z
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
26110Informations de copyright
© 2024. The Author(s).
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