I found this article quite interesting as a lot of my interest in the realm of digital humanities stems from social media and the networks which exist within it. Although there is substantial literature in the conversation of ethics and potential interpretations of publicly available social media data, due to the constantly evolving terrain, there aren’t universally accepted ethical guidelines regarding the use of data collected via social media. The article does raise a good point on the potential biases in the monetization of data and the employment of individuals from an affluent or academically privileged background. Two widely regarded practices of Human Subjects Research are informed consent and appropriately stated information that is considerate of the audience’s comprehension level. In the case of social media companies with majority employee demographics recruited from top universities, the issue of appropriate comprehension levels in privacy information becomes important to discuss. There are terms and conditions that must be agreed upon before joining nearly all social media platforms, but the language of this information is dense, lengthy, and full of legal or technical jargon that the average user cannot effectively comprehend. Even though all users of a platform have consented to a platform’s respective privacy terms, can it be comfortably decided if that consent was informed?

An example which ties in quite well to this reading is a study that was published this week on a five-year-long LinkedIn Social Experiment on the effect of “weak ties’’ as an avenue for employment. The platform ran “multiple large-scale randomized experiments’’ on the UI feature that suggests new connections. Using A/B testing, LinkedIn tested whether job opportunities were more commonly found from close or weak connections; conclusively, the aggregate data showed that the latter was more effective in creating job mobility. While it is common for social media platforms to use A/B testing to gauge consumer feedback on platform updates (which I personally have no qualms with), this experiment raises an ethical dilemma on the impact of the A/B testing on people’s livelihoods. Once there was any form of consensus regarding the efficacy of “weak ties” for job acquisition, the test group who continued to see strong ties recommended to them was put at a disadvantage for finding employment. However beneficial the findings of this study may be, the methods of research add to the ever-growing discourse surrounding ethical social media data analytics.