Author: Rachel Gordon; Publisher: MIT News; Publication Year: 2022. The following article features the author interviewing Jonathan Zong, a computer scientist Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), also the creator of the app Bartleby. Bartleby is a system for debriefing research participants after being involved in social media research. Using Bartleby, researchers can automatically direct each of their…
Author: Nicolas Kayser-Bril; Publisher: AlgorithmWatch; Publication Year: 2020. The following article attempts to explore what drives the Instagram algorithm’s recommendations on people’s timelines led to a serious response form Facebook looking to shut it down. While it was stated to be in the interest of user privacy, the project was designed in a way that guarded this already. This attempt to explore transparency was met…
Author: Mike Conway, Daniel O’Connor; Publisher: Current Opinion in Psychology; Publication Year: 2016. The following article discusses how social media big data being combined with natural language processing (NLP) technology can address public health research questions. Mental health is the fifth greatest contributor to the global burden of disease. Population mental health systems require strengthening to address this need…
Author: Leanne Townsend, Claire Wallace; Publisher: Emerald Insight; Publication Year: 2017. 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…
Author: Leanne Townsend, Claire Wallace; Publisher: Economic and Social Research Council; Publication Year: N/A. The following guide discusses how social media has enabled researchers to quickly obtain information about people’s attitudes in weeks rather than the years it took previously. They discuss how this can be problematic using examples like marijuana legalization. If a Twitter user posts about his/her weed usage, that could potentially get the…
Author: Katherine Knott; Publisher: Inside Higher Ed; Publication Year: 2022. The following article talks about Social Sentinel (now Navigate360), a company offering social media monitoring services to universities. This report talks about how multiple universities have used/are using this service to monitor protests on campus…
Author: Joanna Taylor, Claudia Pagliari; Publisher: SAGE Journals; Publication Year: 2017. The following article explores the ways data is being mined on social media platforms. Data representing people’s behavior, attitudes, feelings, and relationships are being mined from social media platforms and used for research. This can be ethically problematic, even when the data is in the public domain. Recent scandals show just how…
Author: Jerin Michael; Publisher: Growth Animals; Publication Year: 2021. The following article discusses how there are 5 main ethical issues to look for when it comes to online marketing. The first is consumer privacy. Using online tracking, search engines are able to gather information about people and use that information to sell products and advertise to certain people that have shown interest in similar products. The…
Author: Jeff Orlowski; Publisher: Netflix; Publication Year: 2020. The following documentary provides an accessible and easily empathizable narrative for many of the consequences of social media. These “dilemmas” can be thought of as a mental health dilemma, a democracy dilemma, and a discrimination dilemma. The mental health dilemma concerns the repercussions of heavy social media use on primary…
Author: Jamie Mahoney; Publisher: SAGE Journals; Publication Year: 2022. The following article discusses how online social platforms are used all over the world, which makes them an appealing option for investigating various social phenomena like migration. However, monitoring the data from these sites raises ethical concerns over informed consent, especially for migrants, who are typically deemed to be more “vulnerable”…