Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age ─ New Challenges, Cases, and Contexts

The continuous evolution of internet and related social media technologies and platforms have opened up vast new means for communication, socialization, expression, and collaboration. They also have provided new resources for researchers seeking to explore, observe, and measure human opinions, activities, and interactions. However, those using the internet and social media for research – and those tasked with facilitating and monitoring ethical research such as ethical review boards – are confronted with a continuously expanding set of ethical dilemmas. Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Challenges, Cases, and Contexts directly engages with these discussions and debates, and stimulates new ways to think about – and work towards resolving – the novel ethical dilemmas we face as internet and social media-based research continues to evolve. The chapters in this book – from an esteemed collection of global scholars and researchers – offer extensive reflection about current internet research ethics and suggest some important reframings of well-known concepts such as justice, privacy, consent, and research validity, as well as providing concrete case studies and emerging research contexts to learn from.

Michael Zimmer (PhD, New York University) is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he also serves as Director of the Center for Information Policy Research. As a privacy and internet ethics scholar, Zimmer has published and provided expert consultation on internet research ethics internationally.

Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda (PhD, Lancaster University) is a Senior Researcher at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany. As a cultural anthropologist with links to computer science her research covers big data epistemology, social media archiving, security, research ethics and the internet of things.