Public attitudes towards social media field experiments.

ABSTRACT: 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 misinf

SUBMITTER: Straub VJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11525638 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature