Ethics of Social Media Research: State of the Debate and Future Challenges

Since the late 1990s, researchers have been investigating into the ethical issues of Internet research. Among the first works, AoIR Research Ethics Recommendations of 2002 can be mentioned. Internet research ethics issues are still compelling, especially about social media, that are consolidated fields of research but with ethical open questions that will be more and more complex in the future. The chapter will go through these questions, focusing on selected keywords and summarizing for each one the debate, holes, and challenges for the future. The chapter will begin with a definition of the key terms, such as Internet research ethics, social media, and social network sites, as an important step for assessing the ethical issues around social media research. The chapter will then address traditional issues about ethics, like privacy, informed consent, anonymization, Institutional Review Board, and traceability, and then it will focus on new topics, like Big Data, data storage and retrieval, and crowdsourcing work. Besides the specific issues, also broader approaches to privacy will be presented, such as the ones of distributed morality and distributed responsibility, as framework under which build a dialogue between the many actors involved (researchers, companies, users, data, algorithms, programmers)

Can Words Breed or Kill Investment? Metaphors, Imagery, Affect and Investor Behaviour

In "building your portfolio", building is what linguists call a conceptual metaphor: the investor does not literally pile up his assets like they were bricks, but "building" is used as a metaphor for putting together elements. We could therefore also say "cooking", "sewing" or "weaving" your portfolio, as these are also activities that involve putting together elements to make your life comfortable. Conceptual metaphors make some aspects of the topic at hand salient, and hide others. Metaphors create imagery and induce affect. As the latter is shown to influence risk perception and return expectations, it is worthwhile to study metaphors in stock market reporting. In this paper we identify the metaphors in newspaper articles on the stock market both during a crash and in “normal” times. We find that both in the general and the financial press journalists use many metaphors, that these come from a limited number of source domains, and that the latter are predominantly masculine, thus “priming” readers with certain aspects of investing. We speculate that this may create positive affect among men, not women, and bias masculine investors toward excess trading. If so, stock market reporting in newspapers could contribute to the gender difference in stated risk tolerance, financial risk taking, stock market participation and (excess) trading. We suggest further research to verify this