The Ethics of Using Social Media Data in Research: A New Framework

Author: Leanne Townsend, Claire Wallace

Publisher: Emerald Insight

Publication Year: 2017

Summary: The following book chapter talks about how over the past decade, the number of people engaging with social media has grown rapidly. This means that social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are potentially good sources of rich, naturally occurring data. As a result, a growing number of researchers are utilizing these platforms for the collection of data on any number of topics. To date, no consistent approach to the ethics of using social media data has been provided to researchers in this sphere. This chapter presents research that has developed an ethics framework for the use of researchers working with social media data.