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27 - Social Media Ethics 2.0

from Part IV - Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2019

By
Jeremy H. Lipschultz
Edited by
Ali E. Abbas
Ali E. Abbas
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

The development and popularity of computer-mediated communication (CMC), social network sites (SNSs), and social media communication (SMC) sparked twenty-first-century ethical dilemmas (Patching & Hirst, 2014; Barnes, 2003). At the heart of social media ethical concerns are data privacy and ownership. The fallout from the Cambridge Analytica data breach on Facebook, which followed a class action settlement in 2012 over the Beacon program, offers clear evidence that lack of user consent over gathering and disseminating information is a long-standing problem (Terelli, Jr. & Splichal, 2018). Facebook appears to have made the problem worse by allowing user data access to outside, third-party program applications (“apps”), and granting user friends the ability to further weaken privacy (Stratton, 2014).

Type
Chapter
Information
Next-Generation Ethics
Engineering a Better Society
 , pp. 426 - 441
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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