Researching Social Media

Ethical Dilemmas of Researching Social Media

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Ethical Dilemmas of Researching Social Media

Introduction

In this contemporary world, competition has significantly increased in every field of profession. Businesses all across the world are competing each other with a very thin margin. The advent of new media technologies shattered the effectiveness of traditional media. Since traditional media, which is Television, Radio, Outdoor media, Print media etc, are one-way communication methods. A message got disseminated, but there are very limited and long procedure of generating feedback. The arrival of new media, especially the Social Media, has charismatically changed the perceptions of message senders. Senders are now more interested getting into social media, since it is responsive, cost efficient and less time consuming. Many businesses also shifting towards Social Media to promote their offerings. Not only for the business, Social Media also provided researchers to operate in a virtual world, which has all the easy of the world and they can easily look-over their desired content.

However, the beginning of Internet had created limitless opportunities for the communicators to disseminate their messages across the world. While creating numerous opportunities, Internet also has some drawbacks, which are primarily uncontrollable. Internet provided the opportunity to every individual to broadcast any message, from anywhere to everywhere. Internet has no control over message circulation, and the beginning of Social Media has made it even more express. The circulation of any message on the Social Media has a very powerful impact on its users, and similarly one does not have any control over it. This variable of uncontrollability creates many ethical issues in the context of the Internet, and so as the Social media.

Social Media can easily provide you data of any group of people or individual. One can easily overlook the behavior of a particular audience though tracking their communication, social circle, likes or dislike. This also brought up various ethical issues and concerns about the researching on the Social Media.

Ethical Concerns of the Earlier Internet

Ethical concerns on the internet research primarily got related to the information and computer ethics, which got associated with the privacy of data and the difference between public data and private data. The limitless boundaries of the internet have destroyed the difference between what is public and what is private and internet researchers, a lot of time, use someone's confidentialities, private data or intellectual property. One of the biggest dilemmas with Internet is that it has blurred the difference between Professional and Amateur, Authentic and Plagiarized and Public and Private. Thus, there is a greater probability that once can come across with unauthenticated, inaccurate and, sometimes, harmful information on the internet.

Internet is a relatively new and a completely modernized platform for conducting researches. It provides numerous links for screening and collecting data without obtaining the consent from the author or content producer, and it might be very much possible that participant or researcher would have a fake identity. Obtain consent is the most concerning ethical issue in researching on the ...