I recently read a post on The Future Place Blog that got me thinking about social media research in a different light.

As we work to use social media for greater insights, from data mining to online communities, new ethical considerations come to light.

The above post raised concerns about quoting social network posts verbatim because of the potential to track down who said what through searches, thus revealing the poster’s identity.

This is just one more ethical consideration in addition to overall online privacy concerns, misuse of data/findings (e.g., allowing research participants to be targeted/contacted by marketers? … Reminds me of the Domino’s’ ads), and using online research as a guise for selling (i.e., Sugging).

What other concerns do you see cropping up that researchers need to be aware of?