research article on media ethics

The Defining Characteristics of Ethics Papers on Social Media Research: A Systematic Review of the Literature

• Published: 06 November 2023
• Volume 22 , pages 163–189, ( 2024 )

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• Md. Sayeed Al-Zaman   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1433-7387 1 ,
• Ayushi Khemka   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1610-3074 2 ,
• Andy Zhang   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0007-9924-9365 3 &
• Geoffrey Rockwell   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7430-4742 4  

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The growing significance of social media in research demands new ethical standards and practices. Although a substantial body of literature on social media ethics exists, studies on the ethics of conducting research using social media are scarce. The emergence of new evidence sources, like social media, requires innovative methods and renewed consideration of research ethics. Therefore, we pose the following question: What are the defining characteristics of ethics papers on social media research? Following a modified version of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol, we analyzed 34 publications based on ten variables: author gender, publication year, region, academic discipline, type, design, methodology, social media platform in focus, positionality statement, and ethical issues. Our findings suggest contemporary social media research ethics primarily reflects the ethical ideals of the Global North, with limited representation from the Global South. Women authors have published more papers than men authors. Previous studies have prioritized ethical concerns such as privacy, informed consent, and anonymity while overlooking researchers’ risks and the ethics of social media sites. We particularly emphasized the lack of researchers’ positionality statements in research. Our findings will pave the way to understanding social media ethics better, especially with the rapid growth of social media research in global scholarship.

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Al-Zaman, M.S., Khemka, A., Zhang, A. et al. The Defining Characteristics of Ethics Papers on Social Media Research: A Systematic Review of the Literature. J Acad Ethics 22 , 163–189 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-023-09491-7

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The Ethical Implications of Using Social Media to Engage and Retain Justice-Involved Youth in Behavioral Health Research

Christopher a. rodriguez.

1 Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Weill Institute for Neurosciences, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

Lakshmi Gopalakrishnan

Margareth del cid, johanna b. folk, juliet yonek, marina tolou-shams.

Given its popularity among youth ages 13–17, social media is a promising avenue for engaging and retaining historically hard-to-reach youth in longitudinal research. Social media use in longitudinal research involving youth, however, has preceded development of best practices for ethical use. This article describes the ethical challenges and considerations of using social media to engage and retain youth within the context of a randomized controlled trial of a group-based adolescent substance use intervention. Best practices for addressing ethical challenges are also provided using the Belmont Principle as a guiding framework. As social media becomes more commonly used to engage and retain youth in clinical research studies, researchers must address emerging ethical concerns within project protocols.

Longitudinal research has been critical in advancing our understanding of developmental changes occurring during adolescence. Yet longitudinal research studies involving youth often face challenges with maintaining high retention, thereby impacting study validity ( Hansen et al., 1985 ). Retention rates in longitudinal research involving youth range from approximately 38–98% ( Teague et al., 2018 ), with rates among historically hard-to-reach subgroups including justice-involved, unhoused, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth frequently on the lower end of the range. Among justice-involved youth (i.e., youth who have contact with the juvenile justice system), out-of-home placements ( CJJR, 2015 ), transfers to/from detention facilities ( Redding, 2010 ), and restricted access to reliable communication methods, are all factors that can interfere with researchers maintaining contact with these youth, and thus affect participant retention. Low retention rates not only affect power for statistical analysis, but can greatly limit the generalizability of findings regarding the efficacy of evidence-based treatments for justice-involved youth ( Burlew et al., 2011 ).

Understanding factors that hinder or promote sustained contact between participants and researchers has contributed to improvements in the retention of other historically hard-to-reach groups in longitudinal research. Some strategies for retaining hard-to-reach youth include communicating with social networks for LGBT youth ( Liu & Mustanski, 2012 ), employing peer outreach workers to conduct motivational interviewing with youth living with HIV ( Naar-King et al., 2009 ), and engaging in multiple tracking procedures (i.e., contacting collateral contacts, searching internet databases and collecting driver’s records for address updates, mailing letters home, and conducting community visits) for youth experiencing housing instability ( Hobden et al., 2011 ). Less is known about effective strategies for retaining justice-involved youth in longitudinal clinical research ( Montanaro et al., 2015 ) and novel strategies are needed.

Given its popularity among youth ages 13 to 17 ( Anderson & Jiang, 2018 ; Madden et al., 2013 ), social media is a promising retention tool in longitudinal research ( Guillory et al., 2018 ). The use of social media in longitudinal research involving youth, however, has preceded development of best practices for ethical use. Research involving social media is, in general, lacking in discussions about ethics ( Henderson et al., 2013 ) and much of the existing literature on social media research ethics focuses on adult or researcher perspectives on how to ethically use social media for research purposes ( Golder et al., 2017 ; Samuel & Buchanan, 2020 ; Weller & Kinder-Kurlanda, 2014 ). There are unique developmental considerations for using social media as a retention tool with adolescents. Adolescence is a time of increasing autonomy, individuation, and engagement in risky behavior ( Arain et al., 2013 ; Balocchini et al., 2013 ). Social media has the potential to influence identity formation and perceptions of privacy, which are more fluid and evolving during adolescence ( James et al., 2011 ). Parental authorization or consent is still generally required for youth to participate in research in addition to their own assent ( Buchanan & Zimmer, 2021 ; Leikin, 1993 ). However, parental authorization is not required for youth 13 years and older to use social media, so conducting social media research with youth brings its own host of separate ethical issues to consider, including parental underestimation of youth social media involvement ( Blackwell et al., 2016 ), parental concerns about revealing youth identity and location to researchers online ( Spriggs, 2009 ), and youth completing online parental consent forms themselves ( Hokke et al., 2018 ). Existing research on social media with youth focuses on the ethics of using social media to analyze their posts ( Lunnay et al., 2015 ), examining their attitudes about participating in social media research ( Monks et al., 2015 ), and using social media for recruitment, intervention delivery, or health measurement ( Park & Calamaro, 2013 ). Thus, there remains a critical gap in understanding how researchers can ethically use social media as a retention strategy for youth who present with unique developmental considerations relative to adults.

In this article, the authors describe their experiences using social media to enhance retention of youth currently involved or at-risk for involvement in the juvenile justice system in the context of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a group-based adolescent substance use intervention. Due to difficulties contacting youth to complete post-intervention assessments (e.g., frequent changes in residential placement, displacement from communities, competing priorities, changing phone numbers, loss of phone privileges, and limited or inconsistent cellular service), using social media became essential to bolstering retention and facilitating assessment completion. Ethical considerations in using social media to improve retention of underserved youth in longitudinal research and recommendations in alignment with the principles of the Belmont Report are discussed.

Project VOICES

Project VOICES was an RCT testing the efficacy of a group-based substance use intervention for adolescent girls and young women aged 12–24 years who were either on probation or at-risk for justice involvement due to substance use. Participants ( n = 132) were recruited from public schools, community-based organizations serving justice-involved youth, and juvenile courts in northern California, and were randomized at baseline to either the VOICES intervention ( Covington, 2004 ) or an active psychoeducational comparison group matched for time and attention. Group conditions consisted of 12 1-h group sessions with pre- (baseline), mid- (1 month), and post-intervention (3, 6, and 9 months) assessments. Caregivers were also invited to complete longitudinal assessments. As part of baseline assessment procedures to obtain follow-up contact, youth were asked to provide social media account information for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The primary methods used for contacting youth were phone calls and text messages; in the event that youth could not be reached through these methods, researchers attempted contact via social media. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 restricts children under 13 years of age from using social media, so, researchers did not collect social media information or have any social media contact with youth under 13 years of age. Although individuals enrolled in the VOICES trial ranged from 12 to 24 years of age, the discussion in this paper is limited to those aged 13 to 17 years to focus on the ethical issues as they relate to social media use among adolescents.

The Belmont Report

The Belmont Report (1978) serves as the foundation for ethical conduct in human subjects research and provides a useful framework for ethical use of social media in research with youth participants. The Belmont Report (1978) lays out three primary ethical principles: justice (i.e., equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of research), beneficence (i.e., obligation to do no harm and maximize benefits), and respect for persons (i.e., acknowledgment of an individual’s autonomy and a need to protect those with diminished autonomy). Existing frameworks on the ethics of social media research, such as the Privacy by Design framework for online health research recruitment ( Bender et al., 2017 ), focus extensively on risk and privacy concerns as they pertain to minimizing harm and maximizing benefits, but fail to center equity or autonomy ( Moreno et al., 2013 ; Townsend & Wallace, 2016 ; Williams et al., 2017 ). Thus, the Belmont Report was selected as the framework for this discussion because ethical use of social media with youth, and in particular youth involved in or at-risk for involvement in the juvenile justice system, requires a framework that addresses not only minimizing risks and maximizing benefits, but also fair treatment for all participants and the preservation of autonomy throughout study participation. Considerations for ethical use of social media in alignment with each principle of the Belmont Report are outlined below, using experiences from Project VOICES to illustrate; specific suggestions for researchers are presented in Table 1 .

Issues to Consider and Potential Recommendations Using the Belmont Report Framework.

According to the Justice principle, no individual or group should disproportionately bear the burden or acquire the benefits of research. Researchers collected youth social media information during the informed consent/assent discussions, and requested updated information at every follow-up time point. Systematically requesting and using youth social media information to assist with retention is one way of creating an equitable opportunity for all youth to participate in the research study. Not every youth in Project VOICES provided social media account information; however, asking all youth to provide social media information at multiple time points throughout the study allowed for the same opportunity to be contacted for the group intervention sessions and survey assessments. Moreover, using social media or providing account information was not eligibility requirements for participation; youth were not pressured to provide this information, and for youth who did not provide social media information, researchers proceeded with standard contact attempts via phone calls, text messages, collaterals, and letters. Of note, social media platforms can be accessed on any electronic device (e.g., computer, tablet, mobile phone) with Wi-Fi capability and therefore served as an additional way of reaching youth with less reliable cellular service for their group sessions and follow-up assessments.

Beneficence

Researchers have an obligation to minimize risks to individuals’ privacy and safety. This can be challenging when using public platforms such as social media as terms of services (e.g., using data for research, targeted advertisements, selling and sharing information to third parties) can change frequently, be difficult to interpret, and inadvertently lead to data/privacy breaches. Unanticipated disclosures (e.g., social media platform selling data to a third party) can have cascading effects with wide-ranging implications for youth (e.g., reputation, discrimination, legal status, employment). Furthermore, connecting with youth over social media potentially gives researchers access to more information than may be necessary for the project. For example, researchers may inadvertently view content over social media that indicates youth are at-risk of harm to themselves or others, which might necessitate mandated reporting (e.g., child abuse) or follow-up (e.g., suicidal ideation). Mandated reporting may then lead to unintended negative consequences (e.g., exacerbating family tensions and mistrust toward adults, out-of-home protective care placement).

To protect the youth’s safety and stability, the following strategies were integrated into the Project VOICES protocol (see Table 1 ). When gathering youth’s social media account information, youth should type their username into the search bar of the social media platform on the researcher’s encrypted work cellphone. Researchers should refrain from clicking on the youth’s profile to respect their privacy and ensure search history has been cleared before and after the youth searches for their social media account. Staff should record the username into a secure research participant enrollment and retention tracking database. Contact with youth over social media should be limited to direct messages (i.e., avoid posting publicly on youth’s accounts and scrolling through youth’s social media posts) and focus on a clear project-related goal (e.g., scheduling follow-up assessment). Researchers should also stress they are reachable only during standard business hours (e.g., 9am to 6pm). This boundary is necessary in case the youth attempt to disclose harm to themselves or others via social media messaging at a time when no licensed clinician is available to help guide the youth to safety. Unless there is reason to suspect the youth is at-risk of harm to themselves or others, researchers must keep all information confidential. Informed consent should clearly explain how researchers will use social media to communicate with youth and describe mandated reporting requirements as they apply to online communication. Given the potential risk of data breaches associated with social media platforms, all social media-based communication were recorded into a Research Electronic Data Capture database and direct messages were cleared from the lab social media account every few weeks.

Respect for Persons

The Belmont Report outlines specific provisions to ensure participants’ autonomy in research by protecting them from coercion and undue influence. For example, youth must be given the opportunity to make informed decisions about participation and to provide assent separately and privately from parental consent. During the informed consent process, researchers should be transparent with youth and caregivers about how they gather and verify social media accounts, and how and when staff engage with them using social media (e.g., via direct messages only). This will allow youth and caregivers to make an informed decision about providing consent for contact through social media.

In Project VOICES, youth were not always willing to share their social media information when caregivers were present. During several informed consent meetings, caregivers reported their youth did not want them to see their social media profiles or know their usernames. It is developmentally appropriate for youth who are expanding their autonomy to want to keep their social media information private from their caregivers; however, depending on age and situation, data also suggest parents should be monitoring social media accounts by, for example, following their youth’s account or becoming their “friends” ( Khurana et al., 2015 ). Researchers must respect the youth’s autonomy and privacy while balancing family’s norms about their youth’s social media use. First, researchers should address caregiver norms for social media involvement (e.g., when do caregivers follow and not follow their child’s accounts, how much access caregivers have to their child’s accounts). Second, explain potential issues of youth privacy and reemphasize the researcher’s role in maintaining participants’ confidentiality. Third, with the caregiver’s approval, ask for youth’s social media accounts during the assent process, when staff have the opportunity to speak to the youth independently from their caregiver. Finally, researchers must respect that even when a youth is active on social media, they may elect not to respond to the researcher’s direct messages. For example, Instagram allows users to see when those they have previously direct messaged are active online. Researchers can recognize this without directly looking at the youth’s profile and may elect to alter the frequency of their contact attempts. In Project VOICES, when youth regularly read messages and did not reply, staff waited a few days before attempting to reach out again, or reached out through a different communication method (e.g., email, parents, backup contacts) to respect the youth’s decision of whether or not to respond on social media. Researchers should strive for an ethical balance between maintaining high retention rates and respecting the autonomy of youth, while also considering family involvement for safety and open parent-child communication.

Social media offers researchers an opportunity to overcome barriers that have previously hindered the retention of youth in longitudinal research. It is imperative researchers remain vigilant to potential threats to safety and its impact on young research participants. In sharing our recommendations, we encourage researchers to evaluate the ethical issues that may arise when using social media as a retention strategy in order to justly expand their reach with youth and other underserved, hard-to-reach populations.

Best Practices

Researchers must create guidelines in accordance with the Belmont Report for ethical use of social media with youth participants at all stages of research (e.g., pre-consent, consent, post-consent; see Table 1 ). They must also ensure all research staff are familiar with rapidly evolving functionality, terms of service, and security level of all social media platforms used to communicate with youth.

Research Agenda

Ethical use of social media to engage and retain hard-to-reach adolescents, such as justice-involved youth, requires considerably more research. Future research should explore the barriers and facilitators to youth ages 13–17 providing social media information to researchers, as well as their attitudes regarding researchers communicating with them over social media. Furthermore, since communicating with minors for research purposes requires parental authorization, researchers must investigate family norms and expectations around parental involvement in teen social media use to ethically protect research subjects while respecting family boundaries.

Educational Implications

Enrolling youth in research requires the informed assent of the youth and the informed consent of their caregiver. Researchers must therefore ensure all staff receive training on how to clearly explain to families the guidelines for social media use in the research study for communicating with the youth, as well as the confidentiality measures in place for doing so. Furthermore, there must be distinct guidelines for explaining social media use during the informed consent (with caregiver) and youth assent processes to preserve autonomy of all parties and address family norms for youth social media use. Finally, researchers should receive training on the history and current context of the juvenile justice system to ensure use of social media in research does not contribute to further exploitation or marginalization of youth and families.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank our study participants, community partners, and justice system partners.

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported through funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) under grant numbers R01DA03523, K24DA046569, K23DA050798, and T32DA 007250, and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under grant number T32MH018261-33. NIDA and NIMH did not have any role in study design; collection analysis, and interpretation of data, writing the report and the decision to submit the report for publication.

Author Biographies

Christopher A. Rodriguez is a Clinical Research Coordinator at the University of California, San Francisco. His main research interest involves addressing health injustices through community-based participatory research. He facilitated recruitment and retention efforts for Project VOICES and led manuscript writing. [email protected]

Lakshmi Gopalakrishnan is a Clinical Research Supervisor at the University of California, San Francisco. Her major research interests include understanding how integrated community-based interventions can promote child and adolescent mental health, improve family functioning, and reduce substance abuse. She facilitated recruitment and retention efforts for Project VOICES, co-led intervention groups, and contributed to manuscript writing. [email protected]

Margareth Del Cid is a clinical psychology postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research focuses on mitigating behavioral health disparities for underserved youth using digital health tools. She co-facilitated intervention groups for Project VOICES and contributed to manuscript development. [email protected]

Johanna B. Folk is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research focuses on leveraging technology to improve behavioral health outcomes for justice-involved individuals. She supervised recruitment and retention for Project VOICES, facilitated intervention groups, and contributed to conceptualization, writing, and editing of the manuscript. [email protected]

Juliet Yonek is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research focuses on improving access to equitable behavioral health services for adolescents. She co-facilitated intervention groups for Project VOICES and contributed to manuscript development. [email protected]

Marina Tolou-Shams is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and Division Director of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. She leads the UCSF Juvenile Justice Behavioral Health lab that focuses on research to improve mental health, substance use and sexual and reproductive health outcomes for justice-involved youth. She is the Principal Investigator of the NIDA-funded Project VOICES trial that serves as the basis for this manuscript and contributed to conceptualization, writing and editing of the manuscript. [email protected]

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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