Social Networking and Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

First published Fri Aug 3, 2012; substantive revision Mon Aug 30, 2021

Section 1 of the entry outlines the history and working definition of social networking services. Section 2 identifies the early philosophical foundations of reflection on the ethics of online social networks, leading up to the emergence of Web 2.0 standards (supporting user interactions) and full-fledged SNS. Section 3 reviews the primary ethical topic areas around which philosophical reflections on SNS have, to date, converged: privacy; identity and community; friendship, virtue and the good life; democracy, free speech, misinformation/disinformation and the public sphere; and cybercrime. Finally, Section 4 reviews some of the metaethical issues potentially impacted by the emergence of SNS.

In the 21 st century, new media technologies for social networking such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube began to transform the social, political and informational practices of individuals and institutions across the globe, inviting philosophical responses from the community of applied ethicists and philosophers of technology. While scholarly responses to social media continue to be challenged by the rapidly evolving nature of these technologies, the urgent need for attention to the social networking phenomenon is underscored by the fact that it has profoundly reshaped how many human beings initiate and/or maintain virtually every type of ethically significant social bond or role: friend-to-friend, parent-to-child, co-worker-to co-worker, employer-to-employee, teacher-to-student, neighbor-to-neighbor, seller-to-buyer, doctor-to-patient, and voter-to-voter, to offer just a partial list. Nor are the ethical implications of these technologies strictly interpersonal, as it has become evident that social networking services (hereafter referred to as SNS) and other new digital media have profound implications for democracy, public institutions and the rule of law. The complex web of interactions between SNS developers and users, and their online and offline communities, corporations and governments—along with the diverse and sometimes conflicting motives and interests of these various stakeholders—will continue to require rigorous ethical analysis for decades to come.

‘Social networking’ is an inherently ambiguous term
requiring some clarification. Human beings have been socially
‘networked’ in one manner or another for as long as we
have been on the planet, and we have historically availed ourselves of
many successive techniques and instruments for facilitating and
maintaining such networks. These include structured social
affiliations and institutions such as private and public clubs, lodges
and churches as well as communications technologies such as postal and
courier systems, telegraphs and telephones. When philosophers speak
today, however, of ‘Social Networking and Ethics’, they
usually refer more narrowly to the ethical impact of an evolving and
loosely defined group of information technologies, most based on or
inspired by the ‘Web 2.0’ software standards that emerged
in the first decade of the 21st century. While the most
widely used social networking services are free, they operate on large
platforms that offer a range of related products and services that
underpin their business models, from targeted advertising and data
licensing to cloud storage and enterprise software. Ethical impacts of
social networking services are loosely clustered into three categories
– direct impacts of social networking activity itself, indirect
impacts associated with the underlying business models that are
enabled by such activity, and structural implications of SNS as novel
sociopolitical and cultural forces.

Prior to the emergence of Web 2.0 standards, the computer had already
served for decades as a medium for various forms of social networking,
beginning in the 1970s with social uses of the U.S. military’s
ARPANET and evolving to facilitate thousands of Internet newsgroups
and electronic mailing lists, BBS (bulletin board systems), MUDs
(multi-user dungeons) and chat rooms dedicated to an eclectic range of
topics and social identities (Barnes 2001; Turkle 1995). These early
computer social networks were systems that grew up organically,
typically as ways of exploiting commercial, academic or other
institutional software for more broadly social purposes. In contrast,
Web 2.0 technologies evolved specifically to facilitate
user-generated, collaborative and shared Internet content, and while
the initial aims of Web 2.0 software developers were still largely
commercial and institutional, the new standards were designed
explicitly to harness the already-evident potential of the Internet
for social networking. Most notably, Web 2.0 social interfaces
redefined the social topography of the Internet by enabling users to
build increasingly seamless connections between their online social
presence and their existing social networks offline—a trend that
shifted the Internet away from its earlier function as a haven for
largely anonymous or pseudonymous identities forming sui
generis social networks (Ess 2011).

Starting in the first decade of the 21st century, among the first
websites to employ the new standards explicitly for general social
networking purposes were Orkut, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo,
Habbo and Facebook. Subsequent trends in online social networking
include the rise of sites dedicated to media and news sharing
(YouTube, Reddit, Flickr, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, TikTok),
microblogging (Tumblr, Twitter, Weibo), location-based networking
(Foursquare, Loopt, Yelp, YikYak), messaging and VoIP (WhatsApp,
Messenger, WeChat), social gaming (Steam, Twitch) and interest-sharing
(Pinterest).

Study of the ethical implications of SNS was initially seen as a
subpart of Computer and Information Ethics (Bynum 2018). While
Computer and Information Ethics certainly accommodates an
interdisciplinary approach, its direction and problems were initially
largely defined by philosophically-trained scholars such as James Moor
(1985) and Deborah G. Johnson (1985). Yet this has not been the early
pattern for the ethics of social networking. Partly due to the
coincidence of the social networking phenomenon with the emerging
interdisciplinary social science field of ‘Internet
Studies’ (Consalvo and Ess, 2011), the ethical implications of
social networking technologies were initially targeted for inquiry by
a loose coalition of sociologists, social psychologists,
anthropologists, ethnographers, law and media scholars and political
scientists (see, for example, Giles 2006; Boyd 2007; Ellison et al.
2007; Ito 2009). Consequently, philosophers who have turned their
attention to social networking and ethics have had to decide whether
to pursue their inquiries independently, drawing primarily from
traditional philosophical resources in applied computer ethics and the
philosophy of technology, or to develop their views in consultation
with the growing body of empirical data and conclusions already being
generated by other disciplines. While this entry will primarily
confine itself to reviewing existing philosophical research on social
networking ethics, links between those researches and studies in other
disciplinary contexts remain vital.

Indeed, recent academic and popular debates about the harms and
benefits of large social media platforms have been driven far more
visibly by scholars in sociology (Benjamin 2019), information studies
(Roberts 2019), psychology (Zuboff 2019) and other social sciences
than by philosophers, who remain comparatively disengaged. In turn,
rather than engage with philosophical ethics, social science
researchers in this field typically anchor normative dimensions of
their analyses in broader political frameworks of justice and human
rights, or psychological accounts of wellbeing. This has led to a
growing debate about whether philosophical ‘ethics’
remains the right lens through which to subject social networking
services or other emerging technologies to normative critique (Green
2021, Other Internet Resources). This debate is driven by several
concerns. First is the growing professionalization of applied ethics
(Stark and Hoffmann 2019) and its perceived detachment from social
critique. A second concern is the trend of insincere corporate
appropriation of the language of ethics for marketing, crisis
management and public relations purposes, known as
‘ethicswashing’ (Bietti 2020). Finally, there is the
question of whether philosophical theories of ethics, which have
traditionally focused on individual actions, are sufficiently
responsive to the structural conditions of social injustice that drive
many SNS-associated harms.

Among the first philosophers to take an interest in the ethical
significance of social uses of the Internet were phenomenological
philosophers of technology Albert Borgmann and Hubert Dreyfus. These
thinkers were heavily influenced by Heidegger’s (1954 [1977]) view
of technology as a monolithic force with a distinctive vector of
influence, one that tends to constrain or impoverish the human
experience of reality in specific ways. While Borgmann and Dreyfus
were primarily responding to the immediate precursors of Web 2.0
social networks (e.g., chat rooms, newsgroups, online gaming and
email), their conclusions, which aim at online sociality broadly
construed, are directly relevant to SNS.

Borgmann’s early critique (1984) of modern technology addressed
what he called the device paradigm, a technologically-driven
tendency to conform our interactions with the world to a model of easy
consumption. By 1992’s Crossing the Postmodern Divide,
however, Borgmann had become more narrowly focused on the ethical and
social impact of information technologies, employing the concept of
hyperreality to critique (among other aspects of information
technology) the way in which online social networks may subvert or
displace organic social realities by allowing people to “offer
one another stylized versions of themselves for amorous or convivial
entertainment” (1992, 92) rather than allowing the fullness and
complexity of their real identities to be engaged. While Borgmann
admits that in itself a social hyperreality seems “morally
inert” (1992, 94), he insists that the ethical danger of
hyperrealities lies in their tendency to leave us “resentful and
defeated” when we are forced to return from their
“insubstantial and disconnected glamour” to the organic
reality which “with all its poverty inescapably asserts its
claims on us” by providing “the tasks and blessings that
call forth patience and vigor in people.” (1992, 96)

There might be an inherent ambiguity in Borgmann’s analysis,
however. On the one hand he tells us that it is the
competition with our organic and embodied social presence
that makes online social environments designed for convenience,
pleasure and ease ethically problematic, since the latter will
inevitably be judged more satisfying than the ‘real’
social environment. But he goes on to claim that online social
environments are themselves ethically deficient:

Those who become present via a communication link have a diminished
presence, since we can always make them vanish if their presence
becomes burdensome. Moreover, we can protect ourselves from unwelcome
persons altogether by using screening devices….The extended
network of hyperintelligence also disconnects us from the people we
would meet incidentally at concerts, plays and political gatherings.
As it is, we are always and already linked to the music and
entertainment we desire and to sources of political information. This
immobile attachment to the web of communication works a twofold
deprivation in our lives. It cuts us off from the pleasure of seeing
people in the round and from the instruction of being seen and judged
by them. It robs us of the social resonance that invigorates our
concentration and acumen when we listen to music or watch a
play.…Again it seems that by having our hyperintelligent eyes
and ears everywhere, we can attain world citizenship of unequaled
scope and subtlety. But the world that is hyperintelligently spread
out before us has lost its force and resistance. (1992, 105–6)

Critics of Borgmann saw him as adopting Heidegger’s (1954 [1977])
substantivist, monolithic model of technology as a singular,
deterministic force in human affairs (Feenberg 1999; Verbeek 2005).
This model, known as technological determinism, represents
technology as an independent driver of social and cultural change,
shaping human institutions, practices and values in a manner largely
beyond our control. Whether or not this is ultimately Borgmann’s
view (or Heidegger’s), his critics saw it in remarks of the
following sort: “[Social hyperreality] has already begun to
transform the social fabric…At length it will lead to a
disconnected, disembodied, and disoriented sort of life…It is
obviously growing and thickening, suffocating reality and rendering
humanity less mindful and intelligent.” (Borgmann 1992,
108–9)

Critics asserted that Borgmann’s analysis suffered from his lack
of attention to the substantive differences between particular social
networking technologies and their varied contexts of use, as well as
the different motivations and patterns of activity displayed by
individual users in those contexts. For example, Borgmann neglected
the fact that physical reality does not always enable or facilitate
connection, nor does it do so equally for all persons. For example,
those who live in remote rural areas, neurodivergent persons, disabled
persons and members of socially marginalized groups are often not well
served by the affordances of physical social spaces. As a consequence,
Andrew Feenberg (1999) claims that Borgmann overlooked how online
social networks can supply sites of democratic resistance for those
who are physically or politically disempowered by many
‘real-world’ networks.

Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus (2001) shared Borgmann’s early
critical suspicion of the ethical possibilities of the Internet; like
Borgmann, Dreyfus’s reflections on the ethical dimension of
online sociality conveyed a view of such networks as an impoverished
substitute for the real thing. Like Borgmann, Dreyfus’s
suspicion was informed by his phenomenological roots, which led him to
focus his critical attention on the Internet’s suspension of
fully embodied presence. Yet rather than draw upon Heidegger’s
metaphysical framework, Dreyfus (2004) reached back to Kierkegaard in
forming his criticisms of life online. Dreyfus asserts that what
online engagements intrinsically lack is exposure to risk,
and without risk, Dreyfus tells us, there can be no true meaning or
commitment found in the electronic domain. Instead, we are drawn to
online social environments precisely because they allow us to
play with notions of identity, commitment and meaning,
without risking the irrevocable consequences that ground real
identities and relationships. As Dreyfus put it:

…the Net frees people to develop new and exciting selves. The
person living in the aesthetic sphere of existence would surely agree,
but according to Kierkegaard, “As a result of knowing and being
everything possible, one is in contradiction with oneself”
(Present Age, 68). When he is speaking from the point of view of the
next higher sphere of existence, Kierkegaard tells us that the self
requires not “variableness and brilliancy,” but
“firmness, balance, and steadiness” (Dreyfus 2004, 75)

While Dreyfus acknowledges that unconditional commitment and
acceptance of risk are not excluded in principle by online
sociality, he insists that “anyone using the Net who was led to
risk his or her real identity in the real world would have to act
against the grain of what attracted him or her to the Net in the first
place” (2004, 78).

While Borgmann and Dreyfus’s views continue to inform the
philosophical conversation about social networking and ethics, both of
these early philosophical engagements with the phenomenon manifest
certain predictive failures (as is perhaps unavoidable when reflecting
on new and rapidly evolving technological systems). Dreyfus did not
foresee the way in which popular SNS such as Facebook, LinkedIn and
Twitter would shift away from the earlier online norms of anonymity
and identity play, instead giving real-world identities an online
presence which in some ways is less ephemeral than bodily presence (as
those who have struggled to erase online traces of past tweets or to
delete Facebook profiles of deceased loved ones can attest).

Likewise, Borgmann’s critiques of “immobile
attachment” to the online datastream did not anticipate the rise
of mobile social networking applications which not only encourage us
to physically seek out and join our friends at those same concerts,
plays and political events that he envisioned us passively digesting
from an electronic feed, but also enable spontaneous physical
gatherings in ways never before possible. That said, such short-term
predictive failures may not, in the long view, turn out to be fatal to
their legacies. After all, some of the most enthusiastic champions of
the Internet’s liberating social possibilities to be challenged
by Dreyfus (2004, 75), such as Sherry Turkle, have since articulated
far more pessimistic views of the trajectory of new social
technologies. Turkle’s concerns about social media in particular
(2011, 2015), namely that they foster a peculiar alienation in
connectedness that leaves us feeling “alone together,”
resonate well with Borgmann’s earlier warnings about electronic
networks.

2.3.1 Borgmann, Dreyfus and the ‘Cancel Culture’ Debates

The SNS phenomenon continues to be ambiguous with respect to
confirming Borgmann and Dreyfus’ early predictions. One of their
most unfounded worries was that online social media would lead to a
culture in which personal beliefs and actions are stripped of enduring
consequence, cut adrift from real-world identities as persons
accountable to one another. Today, no regular user of Twitter or
Reddit is cut off from “the instruction of being seen and
judged” (Borgmann 1992). And contra Dreyfus, it is primarily
through the power of social media that people’s
identities in the real world are now exposed to greater risk
than before – from doxing to loss of employment to being
physically endangered by ‘swatting.’

If anything, contemporary debates about social media’s alleged
propagation of a stifling ‘cancel culture,’ which bend
back upon the philosophical community itself (Weinberg 2020, Other
Internet Resources), reflect growing anxieties among many that social
networking environments primarily lack affordances for forgiveness and
mercy, not judgment and personal accountability. Yet others see the
emergent phenomenon of online collective judgment as performing a
vital function of moral and political levelling, one in which social
media enable the natural ethical consequences of an agent’s
speech and acts to at last be imposed upon the powerful, not merely
the vulnerable and marginalized.

2.3.2. The Civic Harms of Social Hyperreality

One aspect of Borgmann’s (1992) account has recently rebounded
in plausibility; namely, his prediction of a dire decline in civic
virtues among those fully submerged in the distorted political reality
created by the disembodied and disorienting
‘hyperintelligence’ of online social media. In the wake of
the 2016 UK and US voter manipulation by foreign armies of social
media bots, sock puppets, and astroturf accounts, the world has seen a
rapid global expansion and acceleration of political disinformation
and conspiracy theories through online social networks like Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp.

The profound harms of the ‘weaponization’ of social media
disinformation go well beyond voter manipulation. In 2020,
disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic greatly impeded public
health authorities by clouding the public’s perception of the
severity and transmissibility of the virus as well as the utility of
prophylactics such as mask-wearing. Meanwhile, the increasing global
influence of ever-mutating conspiracy theories borne on social media
platforms by the anonymous group QAnon suggests that Borgmann’s
warning of the dangers of our rising culture of
‘hyperreality,’ long derided as technophobic ‘moral
panic,’ was dismissed far too hastily. While the notorious
‘Pizzagate’ episode of 2016 (Miller 2021) was the first
visible link between QAnon conspiracies and real-world violence, the
alarming uptake in 2020 of QAnon conspiracies by violent right-wing
militias in the United States led Facebook and Twitter to abandon
their prior tolerance of the movement and ban or limit access to
hundreds of thousands of QAnon-associated accounts.

Such moves came too late to stabilize the epistemic and political rift
in a shared reality. By late 2020, QAnon had boosted a widely
successful effort by supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump to
create a (manifestly false) counter-narrative around the 2020 election
purporting that he had actually won, leading to a failed insurrection
at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Borgmann’s warnings on
‘hyperreality’ seem less like moral panic and more like
prescience when one considers the existence of a wide swath of
American voters who remain convinced that Donald Trump remains
legitimately in office, directing actions against his enemies. Such
counter-narratives are not merely ‘underground’ belief
systems; they compete directly with reality itself. On June 17, 2021,
the mainstream national newspaper USA Today found it necessary to
publish a piece titled “Fact Check: Hilary Clinton was not
hanged at Guantanamo Bay” (Wagner 2021) in response to a video
being widely shared on the social media platforms TikTok and
Instagram, which describes in fine detail the (very much alive)
Clinton’s last meal.

Borgmann’s long-neglected work on social hyperreality thus
merits reevaluation in light of the growing fractures and
incoherencies that now splinter and twist our digitally mediated
experience of what remains, underneath it all, a common world. The
COVID-19 pandemic and increasingly catastrophic impacts of climate
change testify to humanity’s vital need to remain anchored in
and intelligently responsive to a shared physical reality.

Yet both the spread of social media-driven disinformation and the rise
of online moral policing reveal an unresolved philosophical tension
that Borgmann’s own work did not explicitly confront. This is
the
Concept of Toleration and its Paradoxes,
which continue to bedevil modern political thought. Social networking
services have transformed this festering concern of political
philosophy into something verging on an existential crisis. When
malice and madness can be amplified on a global scale at lightspeed,
in a manner affordable and accessible to anyone with a smartphone or
wifi connection, what is too injurious and too irremediable, to be
said, or shared (Marin 2021)?

Social media continue to drive a range of new philosophical
investigations in the domains of
social epistemology
and ethics, including ‘vice epistemology’ (Kidd, Battaly,
Cassam 2020). Such investigations raise urgent questions about the
relationship between online disinformation/misinformation, individual
moral and epistemic responsibility, and the responsibility of social
media platforms themselves. On this point, Regina Rini (2017) has
argued that the problem of online disinformation/misinformation is not
properly conceived in terms of individual epistemic vice, but rather
must be seen as a “tragedy of the epistemic commons” that
will require institutional and structural solutions.

While early SNS scholarship in the social and natural sciences tended
to focus on SNS impact on users’ psychosocial markers of
happiness, well-being, psychosocial adjustment, social capital, or
feelings of life satisfaction, philosophical concerns about social
networking and ethics have generally centered on topics less amenable
to empirical measurement (e.g., privacy, identity, friendship, the
good life and democratic freedom). More so than ‘social
capital’ or feelings of ‘life satisfaction,’ these
topics are closely tied to traditional concerns of ethical theory
(e.g., virtues, rights, duties, motivations and consequences). These
topics are also tightly linked to the novel features and distinctive
functionalities of SNS, more so than some other issues of interest in
computer and information ethics that relate to more general Internet
functionalities (for example, issues of copyright and intellectual
property).

Despite the methodological challenges of applying philosophical theory
to rapidly shifting empirical patterns of SNS influence, philosophical
explorations of the ethics of SNS have continued in recent years to
move away from Borgmann and Dreyfus’ transcendental-existential
concerns about the Internet, to the empirically-driven space of
applied technology ethics. Research in this space explores three
interlinked and loosely overlapping kinds of ethical phenomena:

• direct ethical impacts of social networking activity
  itself (just or unjust, harmful or beneficial) on participants as well
  as third parties and institutions;
• indirect ethical impacts on society of social networking
  activity, caused by the aggregate behavior of users, platform
  providers and/or their agents in complex interactions between these
  and other social actors and forces;
• structural impacts of SNS on the ethical shape of
  society, especially those driven by the dominant surveillant and
  extractivist value orientations that sustain social networking
  platforms and culture.

Most research in the field, however, remains topic- and
domain-driven—exploring a given potential harm or
domain-specific ethical dilemma that arises from direct, indirect, or
structural effects of SNS, or more often, in combination. Sections
3.1–3.5 outline the most widely discussed of contemporary
SNS’ ethical challenges.

Fundamental practices of concern for direct ethical impacts on privacy
include: the transfer of users’ data to third parties for
intrusive purposes, especially marketing, data mining, and
surveillance; the use of SNS data to train facial-recognition systems
or other algorithmic tools that identify, track and profile people
without their free consent; the ability of third-party applications to
collect and publish user data without their permission or awareness;
the dominant reliance by SNS on opaque or inadequate privacy settings;
the use of ‘cookies’ to track online user activities after
they have left a SNS; the abuse of social networking tools or data for
stalking or harassment; widespread scraping of social media data by
academic researchers for a variety of unconsented purposes;
undisclosed sharing of user information or patterns of activity with
government entities; and, last but not least, the tendency of SNS to
foster imprudent, ill-informed or unethical information sharing
practices by users, either with respect to their own personal data or
data related to other persons and entities. Facebook has been a
particular lightning-rod for criticism of its privacy practices
(Spinello 2011, Vaidhyanathan 2018), but it is just the most visible
member of a far broader and more complex network of SNS actors with
access to unprecedented quantities of sensitive personal data.

Indirectly, the incentives of social media environments create
particular problems with respect to privacy norms. For example, since
it is the ability to access information freely shared by others that
makes SNS uniquely attractive and useful, and since platforms are
generally designed to reward disclosure, it turns out that contrary to
traditional views of information privacy, giving users greater control
over their information-sharing practices can actually lead to
decreased privacy for themselves and others in their network.
Indeed, advertisers, insurance companies and employers are
increasingly less interested in knowing the private facts of
individual users’ lives, and more interested in using their data
to train algorithms that can predict the behavior of people very
much like that user. Thus the real privacy risk of our social
media practices is often not to ourselves but to other people; if a
person is comfortable with the personal risk of their data sharing
habits, it does not follow that these habits are ethically benign.
Moreover, users are still caught in the tension between their personal
motivations for using SNS and the profit-driven motivations of the
corporations that possess their data (Baym 2011, Vaidhyanathan 2018).
Jared Lanier frames the point cynically when he states that:
“The only hope for social networking sites from a business point
of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of
violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable” (Lanier
2010).

Scholars also note the way in which SNS architectures are often
structurally insensitive to the granularity of human sociality (Hull,
Lipford & Latulipe 2011). That is, such architectures tend to
treat human relations as if they are all of a kind, ignoring the
profound differences among types of social relation (familial,
professional, collegial, commercial, civic, etc.). As a consequence,
the privacy controls of such architectures often flatten the
variability of privacy norms within different but overlapping social
spheres. Among philosophical accounts of privacy, Nissenbaum’s
(2010) view of contextual integrity has seemed to many to be
particularly well suited to explaining the diversity and complexity of
privacy expectations generated by new social media (see for example
Grodzinsky and Tavani 2010; Capurro 2011). Contextual integrity
demands that our information practices respect context-sensitive
privacy norms, where ‘context’ refers not to the overly
coarse distinction between ‘private’ and
‘public,’ but to a far richer array of social settings
characterized by distinctive roles, norms and values. For example, the
same piece of information made ‘public’ in the context of
a status update to family and friends on Facebook may nevertheless be
considered by the same discloser to be ‘private’ in other
contexts; that is, she may not expect that same information to be
provided to strangers Googling her name, or to bank employees
examining her credit history.

On the design side, such complexity means that attempts to produce
more ‘user-friendly’ privacy controls face an uphill
challenge—they must balance the need for simplicity and ease of
use with the need to better represent the rich and complex structures
of our social universes. A key design question, then, is how SNS
privacy interfaces can be made more accessible and more
socially intuitive for users.

Hull et al. (2011) also take note of the apparent plasticity of user
attitudes about privacy in SNS contexts, as evidenced by the pattern
of widespread outrage over changed or newly disclosed privacy
practices of SNS providers being followed by a period of accommodation
to and acceptance of the new practices (Boyd and Hargittai 2010). In
their 2018 book Re-Engineering Humanity, Brett Frischmann and
Evan Selinger argue that SNS contribute to a slippery slope of
“techno-social engineering creep” that produces a gradual
normalization of increasingly pervasive and intrusive digital
surveillance. A related concern is the “privacy paradox,”
in which users’ voluntary sharing of data online belies their
own stated values concerning privacy. However, recent data from
Apple’s introduction in iOS 14.5 of opt-in for ad tracking,
which the vast majority of iOS users have declined to allow, suggests
that most people continue to value and act to protect their privacy,
when given a straightforward choice that does not inhibit their access
to services (Axon 2021). Working from the late writings of Foucault,
Hull (2015) has explored the way in which the
‘self-management’ model of online privacy protection
embodied in standard ‘notice and consent’ practices only
reinforces a narrow neoliberal conception of privacy, and of
ourselves, as commodities for sale and exchange. The debate continues
about whether privacy violations can be usefully addressed by users
making wiser privacy-preserving choices (Véliz 2021), or
whether the responsibilization of individuals only obscures the urgent
need for radical structural reforms of SNS business models
(Vaidhyanathan 2018).

In an early study of online communities, Bakardjieva and Feenberg
(2000) suggested that the rise of communities predicated on the open
exchange of information may in fact require us to relocate our focus
in information ethics from privacy concerns to concerns about
alienation; that is, the exploitation of information for
purposes not intended by the relevant community. Such considerations
give rise to the possibility of users deploying “guerrilla
tactics” of misinformation, for example, by providing SNS hosts
with false names, addresses, birthdates, hometowns or employment
information. Such tactics would aim to subvert the emergence of a new
“digital totalitarianism” that uses the power of
information rather than physical force as a political control (Capurro
2011).

Finally, privacy issues with SNS highlight a broader philosophical and
structural problem involving the intercultural dimensions of
information ethics and the challenges for ethical pluralism in global
digital spaces (Ess 2021). Pak Hang Wong (2013) has argued for the
need for privacy norms to be contextualized in ways that do not impose
a culturally hegemonic Western understanding of why privacy matters;
for example, in the Confucian context, it is familial privacy rather
than individual privacy that is of greatest moral concern. Rafael
Capurro (2005) has also noted the way in which narrowly Western
conceptions of privacy occlude other legitimate ethical concerns
regarding new media practices. For example, he notes that in addition
to Western worries about protecting the private domain from public
exposure, we must also take care to protect the public sphere
from the excessive intrusion of the private. Though he illustrates the
point with a comment about intrusive uses of cell phones in public
spaces (2005, 47), the rise of mobile social networking has amplified
this concern by several factors. When one must compete with Facebook
or Twitter for the attention of not only one’s dinner companions
and family members, but also one’s fellow drivers, pedestrians,
students, moviegoers, patients and audience members, the integrity of
the public sphere comes to look as fragile as that of the private.

Social networking technologies open up a new type of ethical space in
which personal identities and communities, both ‘real’ and
virtual, are constructed, presented, negotiated, managed and
performed. Accordingly, philosophers have analyzed SNS both in terms
of their uses as Foucaultian “technologies of the self”
(Bakardjieva and Gaden 2012) that facilitate the construction and
performance of personal identity, and in terms of the distinctive
kinds of communal norms and moral practices generated by SNS (Parsell
2008).

The ethical and metaphysical issues generated by the formation of
virtual identities and communities have attracted much philosophical
interest (see Introna 2011 and Rodogno 2012). Yet as noted by Patrick
Stokes (2012), unlike earlier forms of online community in which
anonymity and the construction of alter-egos were typical, SNS such as
Facebook increasingly anchor member identities and connections to
real, embodied selves and offline ‘real-world’ networks.
Yet SNS still enable users to directly manage their self-presentation
and their social networks in ways that offline social spaces at home,
school or work often do not permit. The result, then, is an identity
grounded in the person’s material reality and embodiment but
more explicitly “reflective and aspirational” (Stokes
2012, 365) in its presentation, a phenomenon encapsulated in social
media platforms such as Instagram. This raises a number of ethical
questions: first, from what source of normative guidance or value does
the aspirational content of an SNS user’s identity primarily
derive? Do identity performances on SNS generally represent the same
aspirations and reflect the same value profiles as users’
offline identity performances? Do they display any notable differences
from the aspirational identities of non-SNS users? Are the values and
aspirations made explicit in SNS contexts more or less heteronomous in
origin than those expressed in non-SNS contexts? Do the more
explicitly aspirational identity performances on SNS encourage users
to take steps to actually embody those aspirations offline, or do they
tend to weaken the motivation to do so?

A further SNS phenomenon of relevance here is the persistence and
communal memorialization of Facebook profiles after the user’s
death; not only does this reinvigorate a number of classical ethical
questions about our ethical duties to honor and remember the dead, it
also renews questions about whether our moral identities can persist
after our embodied identities expire, and whether the dead have
ongoing interests in their social presence or reputation (Stokes
2012).

Mitch Parsell (2008) raised early concerns about the unique
temptations of ‘narrowcast’ social networking communities
that are “composed of those just like yourself, whatever your
opinion, personality or prejudices.” (41) Such worries about
‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ have only
become more acute as political polarization continues to dominate
online culture. Among the structural affordances of SNS is a tendency
to constrict our identities to a closed set of communal norms that
perpetuate increased polarization, prejudice and insularity. Parsells
admitted that in theory the many-to-many or one-to-many
relations enabled by SNS allow for exposure to a greater variety of
opinions and attitudes, but in practice they often have the
opposite effect. Building from de Laat (2006), who suggests that
members of virtual communities embrace a distinctly
hyperactive style of communication to compensate for
diminished informational cues, Parsell claimed that in the absence of
the full range of personal identifiers evident through face-to-face
contact, SNS may also indirectly promote the deindividuation
of personal identity by exaggerating and reinforcing the significance
of singular shared traits (liberal, conservative, gay, Catholic, etc.)
that lead us to see ourselves and our SNS contacts more as
representatives of a group than as unique persons (2008, 46).

Parsell also noted the existence of inherently pernicious
identities and communities that may be enabled or enhanced by SNS
tools—he cites the example of apotemnophiliacs, or would-be
amputees, who use such resources to create mutually supportive
networks in which their self-destructive desires receive validation
(2008, 48). Related concerns have been raised about
“Pro-ANA” sites that provide mutually supportive networks
for anorexics seeking information and tools to allow them to
perpetuate disordered and self-harming identities (Giles 2006;
Manders-Huits 2010).

Restraint of such affordances necessarily comes at some cost to user
autonomy—a value that in other circumstances is critical to
respecting the ethical demands of identity, as noted by Noemi
Manders-Huits (2010). Manders-Huits explores the tension between the
way in which SNS treat users as profiled and forensically
reidentifiable “objects of (algorithmic) computation”
(2010, 52) while at the same time offering those users an attractive
space for ongoing identity construction. She argues that SNS
developers have a duty to protect and promote the interests of their
users in autonomously constructing and managing their own moral and
practical identities. This autonomy exists in some tension with
widespread but still crude practices of automated SNS content
moderation that seek on the one hand, to preserve a ’safe’
space for expression, yet may disproportionately suppress marginalized
identities (Gillespie 2020).

The ethical concern about SNS constraints on user autonomy is also
voiced by Bakardjieva and Gaden (2012) who note that whether they wish
their identities to be formed and used in this manner or not, the
online selves of SNS users are constituted by the categories
established by SNS developers, and ranked and evaluated according to
the currency which primarily drives the narrow “moral
economy” of SNS communities: popularity (2012, 410). They note,
however, that users are not rendered wholly powerless by this schema;
users retain, and many exercise, “the liberty to make informed
choices and negotiate the terms of their self-constitution and
interaction with others,” (2012, 411) whether by employing means
to resist the “commercial imperatives” of SNS sites
(ibid.) or by deliberately restricting the scope and extent of their
personal SNS practices.

SNS can also enable authenticity in important ways. While a
‘Timeline’ feature that displays my entire online personal
history for all my friends to see can prompt me to ‘edit’
my past, it can also prompt me to face up to and assimilate into my
self-conception thoughts and actions that might otherwise be
conveniently forgotten. The messy collision of my family, friends and
coworkers on Facebook can be managed with various tools offered by the
site, allowing me to direct posts only to specific sub-networks that I
define. But the far simpler and less time-consuming strategy is to
come to terms with the collision—allowing each network member to
get a glimpse of who I am to others, while at the same time asking
myself whether these expanded presentations project a person that is
more multidimensional and interesting, or one that is manifestly
insincere. As Tamara Wandel and Anthony Beavers put it:

I am thus no longer radically free to engage in creating a completely
fictive self, I must become someone real, not who I really am pregiven
from the start, but who I am allowed to be and what I am able to
negotiate in the careful dynamic between who I want to be and who my
friends from these multiple constituencies perceive me, allow me, and
need me to be. (2011, 93)

Even so, Dean Cocking (2008) has argued that many online social
environments, by amplifying active aspects of self-presentation under
our direct control, compromise the important function of
passive modes of embodied self-presentation beyond our
conscious control, such as body language, facial expression, and
spontaneous displays of emotion (130). He regards these as important
indicators of character that play a critical role in how others see
us, and by extension, how we come to understand ourselves through
others’ perceptions and reactions. If Cocking’s view is
correct, then SNS that privilege text-based and asynchronous
communications may hamper our ability to cultivate and express
authentic identities. The subsequent rise in popularity of video and
livestream SNS services such as YouTube, TikTok, Stream and Twitch
might therefore be seen as enabling of greater authenticity in
self-presentation. Yet in reality, the algorithmic and profit
incentives of these platforms have been seen to reward distorted
patterns of expression: compulsive, ‘always performing’
norms that are reported to contribute to burnout and breakdown by
content creators (Parkin 2018).

Ethical preoccupations with the impact of SNS on our authentic
self-constitution and representation may be assuming a false dichotomy
between online and offline identities; the informational theory of
personal identity offered by Luciano Floridi (2011) problematizes this
distinction. Soraj Hongladarom (2011) employs such an informational
metaphysic to deny that any clear boundary can be drawn between our
offline selves and our selves as cultivated through SNS. Instead, our
personal identities online and off are taken as externally constituted
by our informational relations to other selves, events and
objects.

Likewise, Charles Ess makes a link between relational models of the
self found in Aristotle, Confucius and many contemporary feminist
thinkers and emerging notions of the networked individual as a
“smeared-out self” (2010, 111) constituted by a shifting
web of embodied and informational relations. Ess points out that by
undermining the atomic and dualistic model of the self upon which
Western liberal democracies are founded, this new conception of the
self forces us to reassess traditional philosophical approaches to
ethical concerns about privacy and autonomy—and may even promote
the emergence of a much-needed “global information ethics”
(2010, 112). Yet he worries that our ‘smeared-out selves’
may lose coherence as the relations that constitute us are
increasingly multiplied and scattered among a vast and expanding web
of networked channels. Can such selves retain the capacities of
critical rationality required for the exercise of liberal democracy,
or will our networked selves increasingly be characterized by
political and intellectual passivity, hampered in self-governance by
“shorter attention spans and less capacity to engage with
critical argument” (2010, 114)? Ess suggests that we hope for,
and work to enable the emergence of, ‘hybrid selves’ that
cultivate the individual moral and practical virtues needed to
flourish within our networked and embodied relations (2010, 116).

SNS can facilitate many types of relational connections: LinkedIn
encourages social relations organized around our professional lives,
Twitter is useful for creating lines of communication between ordinary
individuals and figures of public interest, MySpace was for a time a
popular way for musicians to promote themselves and communicate with
their fans, and Facebook, which began as a way to link university
cohorts and now connects people across the globe, also hosts business
profiles aimed at establishing links to existing and future customers.
Yet the overarching relational concept in the SNS universe has been,
and continues to be, the ‘friend,’ as underscored by the
now-common use of this term as a verb to refer to acts of instigating
or confirming relationships on SNS.

This appropriation and expansion of the concept ‘friend’
by SNS has provoked a great deal of scholarly interest from
philosophers and social scientists, more so than any other ethical
concern except perhaps privacy. Early concerns about SNS friendship
centered on the expectation that such sites would be used primarily to
build ‘virtual’ friendships between physically separated
individuals lacking a ‘real-world’ or
‘face-to-face’ connection. This perception was an
understandable extrapolation from earlier patterns of Internet
sociality, patterns that had prompted philosophical worries about
whether online friendships could ever be ‘as good as the real
thing’ or were doomed to be pale substitutes for embodied
‘face to face’ connections (Cocking and Matthews 2000).
This view was robustly opposed by Adam Briggle (2008), who claimed
that online friendships might enjoy certain unique advantages. For
example, Briggle asserted that friendships formed online might be more
candid than offline ones, thanks to the sense of security provided by
physical distance (2008, 75). He also noted the way in which
asynchronous written communications can promote more deliberate and
thoughtful exchanges (2008, 77).

These sorts of questions about how online friendships measure up to
offline ones, along with questions about whether or to what extent
online friendships encroach upon users’ commitments to embodied,
‘real-world’ relations with friends, family members and
communities, defined the ethical problem-space of online friendship as
SNS began to emerge. But it did not take long for empirical studies of
actual SNS usage trends to force a profound rethinking of this
problem-space. Within five years of Facebook’s launch, it was
evident that a significant majority of SNS users were relying on these
sites primarily to maintain and enhance relationships with those with
whom they also had a strong offline connection—including close
family members, high-school and college friends and co-workers
(Ellison, Steinfeld and Lampe 2007; Ito et al. 2009; Smith 2011). Nor
are SNS used to facilitate purely online exchanges—many SNS
users today rely on the sites’ functionalities to organize
everything from cocktail parties to movie nights, outings to athletic
or cultural events, family reunions and community meetings. Mobile SNS
applications amplify this type of functionality further, by enabling
friends to locate one another in their community in real-time,
enabling spontaneous meetings at restaurants, bars and shops that
would otherwise happen only by coincidence.

Yet lingering ethical concerns remain about the way in which SNS can
distract users from the needs of those in their immediate physical
surroundings (consider the widely lamented trend of users obsessively
checking their social media feeds during family dinners, business
meetings, romantic dates and symphony performances). Such phenomena,
which scholars like Sherry Turkle (2011, 2015) continue to worry are
indicative of a growing cultural tolerance for being ‘alone
together,’ bring a new complexity to earlier philosophical
concerns about the emergence of a zero-sum game between offline
relationships and their virtual SNS competitors. They have also
prompted a shift of ethical focus away from the question of whether
online relationships are “real” friendships (Cocking and
Matthews 2000), to how well the real friendships we bring to SNS are
being served there (Vallor 2012). The debate over the value and
quality of online friendships continues (Sharp 2012; Froding and
Peterson 2012; Elder 2014; Turp 2020; Kristjánsson 2021); in
large part because the typical pattern of those friendships, like most
social networking phenomena, continues to evolve.

Such concerns intersect with broader philosophical questions about
whether and how the classical ethical ideal of ‘the good
life’ can be engaged in the 21st century. Pak-Hang
Wong claims that this question requires us to broaden the standard
approach to information ethics from a narrow focus on the
“right/the just” (2010, 29) that defines ethical action
negatively (e.g., in terms of violations of privacy,
copyright, etc.) to a framework that conceives of a positive
ethical trajectory for our technological choices; for example, the
ethical opportunity to foster compassionate and caring communities, or
to create an environmentally sustainable economic order. Edward Spence
(2011) further suggests that to adequately address the significance of
SNS and related information and communication technologies for the
good life, we must also expand the scope of philosophical inquiry
beyond its present concern with narrowly interpersonal ethics to the
more universal ethical question of prudential wisdom. Do SNS
and related technologies help us to cultivate the broader intellectual
virtue of knowing what it is to live well, and how to best pursue it?
Or do they tend to impede its development?

This concern about prudential wisdom and the good life is part of a
growing philosophical interest in using the resources of classical and
contemporary virtue ethics to evaluate the impact of SNS and related
technologies (Vallor 2016, 2010; Wong 2012; Ess 2008). This program of
research promotes inquiry into the impact of SNS not merely on the
cultivation of prudential virtue, but on the development of a host of
other moral and communicative virtues, such as honesty, patience,
justice, loyalty, benevolence and empathy.

As is the case with privacy, identity, community and friendship on
SNS, ethical debates about the impact of SNS on civil discourse,
freedom and democracy in the public sphere must be seen as extensions
of a broader discussion about the political implications of the
Internet, one that predates Web 2.0 standards. Much of the literature
on this subject focuses on the question of whether the Internet
encourages or hampers the free exercise of deliberative public reason,
in a manner informed by Jürgen Habermas’s (1992/1998)
account of discourse ethics and deliberative democracy in the public
sphere (Ess 1996 and 2005b; Dahlberg 2001; Bohman 2008). A related
topic of concern is SNS fragmentation of the public sphere by
encouraging the formation of ‘echo chambers’ and
‘filter bubbles’: informational silos for like-minded
individuals who deliberately shield themselves from exposure to
alternative views. Early worries that such insularity would promote
extremism and the reinforcement of ill-founded opinions, while also
preventing citizens of a democracy from recognizing their shared
interests and experiences (Sunstein 2008), have unfortunately proven
to be well-founded (as noted in section 2.3.2). Early optimism that
SNS would facilitate popular revolutions resulting in the overthrow of
authoritarian regimes (Marturano 2011; Frick and Oberprantacher 2011)
have likewise given way to the darker reality that SNS are perhaps
even more easily used as tools to popularize authoritarian and
totalitarian movements, or foster genocidal impulses, as in the use of
Facebook to drive violence against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar
(BBC 2018).

When SNS in particular are considered in light of these questions,
some distinctive considerations arise. First, sites like Facebook and
Twitter (as opposed to narrower SNS utilities such as LinkedIn)
facilitate the sharing of, and exposure to, an extremely diverse range
of types of discourse. On any given day on Facebook a user
may encounter in her NewsFeed a link to an article in a respected
political magazine followed by a video of a cat in a silly costume,
followed by a link to a new scientific study, followed by a lengthy
status update someone has posted about their lunch, followed by a
photo of a popular political figure overlaid with a clever and
subversive caption. Vacation photos are mixed in with political rants,
invitations to cultural events, birthday reminders and data-driven
graphs created to undermine common political, moral or economic
beliefs. Thus while a user has a tremendous amount of liberty to
choose which forms of discourse to pay closer attention to, and tools
with which to hide or prioritize the posts of certain members of her
network, the sheer diversity of the private and public concerns of her
fellows would seem to offer at least some measure of protection
against the extreme insularity and fragmentation of discourse that is
incompatible with the public sphere.

Yet in practice, the function of hidden platform algorithms can defeat
this diversity. Trained on user behavior to optimize for engagement
and other metrics that advertisers and platform companies associate
with their profit, these algorithms can ensure that I experience only
a pale shadow of the true diversity of my social network, seeing at
the top of my feed only those posts that I am most likely to find
subjectively rewarding to engage with. If, for example, I support the
Black Lives Matter movement, and tend to close the app in frustration
and disappointment whenever I see BLM denigrated by someone I consider
a friend, the platform algorithm can easily learn this association and
optimize my experience for one that is more conducive to retaining my
presence. It is important to note, however, that in this case the
effect is an interaction between the algorithm and my own behavior.
How much responsibility for echo chambers and resulting polarization
or insularity falls upon users, and how much on the designers of
algorithms that track and amplify our expressed preferences?

Philosophers of technology often speak of the affordances or
gradients of particular technologies in given contexts
(Vallor 2010) insofar as they make certain patterns of use more
attractive or convenient for users (while not rendering alternative
patterns impossible). Thus while I can certainly seek out
posts that will cause me discomfort or anxiety, the platform gradient
will not be designed to facilitate such experiences. Yet it is not
obvious if or when it should be designed to do so. As Alexis
Elder notes (2020), civic discourse on social media can be furthered
rather than inhibited by prudent use of tools enabling disconnection.
Additionally, a platform affordance that makes a violent white
supremacist feel accepted, valued, safe and respected in their social
milieu (precisely for their expressed attitudes and beliefs
in white supremacist violence) facilitates harm to others, in a way
that a platform affordance that makes an autistic person or a
transgender woman feel accepted, valued, safe and respected for who
they are, does not. Fairness and equity in SNS platform design do not
entail neutrality. Ethics explicitly demands non-neutrality
between harm and nonharm, between justice and injustice. But ethics
also requires epistemic anchoring in reality. Thus even if my own
attitudes and beliefs harm no one, I may still have a normative
epistemic duty to avoid the comfort of a filter bubble. Do SNS
platforms have a duty to keep their algorithms from helping me into
one? In truth, those whose identities are historically marginalized
will rarely have the luxury of the filter bubble option; online and
offline worlds consistently offer stark reminders of their
marginalization. So how do SNS designers, users, and regulators
mitigate the deleterious political and epistemic effects of filter
bubble phenomena without making platforms more inhospitable to
vulnerable groups than they already are?

One must also ask whether SNS can skirt the dangers of a plebiscite
model of democratic discourse, in which minority voices are dispersed
and drowned out by the many. Certainly, compared to the
‘one-to-many’ channels of communication favored by
traditional media, SNS facilitate a ‘many-to-many’ model
of communication that appears to lower the barriers to participation
in civic discourse for everyone, including the marginalized. However,
SNS lack the institutional structures necessary to ensure that
minoritized voices enjoy not only free, but substantively
equal access to the deliberative function of the public
sphere.

We must also consider the quality of informational exchanges on SNS
and the extent to which they promote a genuinely dialogical
and deliberative public sphere marked by the exercise of
critical rationality. SNS norms tend to privilege brevity and
immediate impact over substance and depth in communication; Vallor
(2012) suggests that this bodes poorly for the cultivation of those
communicative virtues essential to a flourishing public sphere. This
worry is only reinforced by empirical data suggesting that SNS
perpetuate the ‘Spiral of Silence’ phenomenon that results
in the passive suppression of divergent views on matters of important
political or civic concern (Hampton et. al. 2014). In a related
critique, Frick and Oberprantacher (2011) claim that the ability of
SNS to facilitate public ‘sharing’ can obscure the deep
ambiguity between sharing as “a promising, active participatory
process” and “interpassive, disjointed acts of having
trivia shared.” (2011, 22)

There remains a notable gap online between the prevalence of
democratic discourse and debate—which require only the open
voicing of opinions and reasons, respectively—and the relative
absence of democratic deliberation, which requires the joint
exercise of collective intentions, cooperation and compromise as well
as a shared sense of reality on which to act. The greatest moral
challenges of our time—responding to the climate change crisis,
developing sustainable patterns of economic and social life, managing
global threats to public health—aren’t going to be solved
by ideological warfare but by deliberative, coordinated exercise of
public wisdom. Today’s social media platforms are great for
cultivating the former; for the latter, not so much.

Another vital issue for online democracy relates to the contentious
debate emerging on social media platforms about the extent to which
controversial or unpopular speech ought to be tolerated or punished by
private actors, especially when the consequences manifest in
traditional offline contexts and spaces such as the university. For
example, the norms of academic freedom in the U.S. were greatly
destabilized by the ‘Salaita Affair’ (in which a tenured
job offer by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to Steven
Salaita was withdrawn on the basis of his tweets criticizing Israel)
and several other cases in which academics were censured or otherwise
punished by their institutions as a result of their controversial
social media posts (Protevi 2018). Yet how should we treat a post by a
professor that expresses a desire to sleep with their students, or
that expresses their doubts about the intelligence of women, or the
integrity of students of a particular nationality? It remains to be
seen what equilibrium can be found between moral accountability and
free expression in communities increasingly mediated by SNS
communications. A related debate concerns the ethical and social value
of the kind of social media acts of moral policing frequently derided
as insincere or performative ‘virtue signaling.’ To what
extent are social media platforms a viable stage for moral
performances, and are such performances merely performative?
Are they inherently ‘grandstanding’ abuses of moral
discourse (Tosi and Warmke 2020), or can they in fact be positive
forces for social progress and reform (Levy 2020, Westra 2021)?

It also remains to be seen to what extent civic discourse and activism
on SNS will continue to be manipulated or compromised by the
commercial interests that currently own and manage the technical
infrastructure. This concern is driven by the growing economic and
political influence of companies in the technology sector, what
Luciano Floridi (2015b) calls ‘grey power,’ and the
potentially disenfranchising and disempowering effects of an economic
model in which most users play a passive role (Floridi 2015a). Indeed,
the relationship between social media users and service providers has
become increasingly contentious, as users struggle to demand more
privacy, better data security and more effective protections from
online harassment in an economic context where they have little or no
direct bargaining power (Zuboff 2019).

This imbalance was powerfully illustrated by the revelation in 2014
that Facebook researchers had quietly conducted psychological
experiments on users without their knowledge, manipulating their moods
by altering the balance of positive or negative items in their News
Feeds (Goel 2014). The study added yet another dimension to existing
concerns about the ethics and validity of social science research that
relies on SNS-generated data (Buchanan and Zimmer 2012), concerns that
drive an increasingly vital and contested area of research ethics
(Woodfield 2018, franzke et al. 2020).

Ironically, in the power struggle between users and SNS providers,
social networking platforms themselves have become the primary
battlefield, where users vent their collective outrage in an attempt
to force service providers into responding to their demands. The
results are sometimes positive, as when Twitter users, after years of
complaining, finally shamed the company in 2015 into providing better
reporting tools for online harassment. Yet by its nature the process
is chaotic and often controversial, as when later that year, Reddit
users successfully demanded the ouster of CEO Ellen Pao, under whose
leadership Reddit had banned some of its more repugnant
‘subreddit’ forums (such as “Fat People
Hate”).

The only clear consensus emerging from the considerations outlined
here is that if SNS are going to facilitate any enhancement of a
Habermasian public sphere, or the civic virtues and praxes of reasoned
discourse that any functioning public sphere must presuppose, then
users will have to actively mobilize themselves to exploit such an
opportunity (Frick and Oberprantacher 2011). Such mobilization may
depend upon resisting the “false sense of activity and
accomplishment” (Bar-Tura, 2010, 239) that may come from merely
clicking ‘Like’ in response to acts of meaningful
political speech, forwarding calls to sign petitions, or simply
‘following’ an outspoken social critic on Twitter whose
‘tweeted’ calls to action are drowned in a tide of
corporate announcements, celebrity product endorsements and personal
commentaries. Some argue that it will also require the cultivation of
new norms and virtues of online civic-mindedness, without which online
‘democracies’ will continue to be subject to the
self-destructive and irrational tyrannies of mob behavior (Ess
2010).

SNS are hosts for a broad spectrum of ‘cybercrimes’ and
related direct harms, including but not limited to:
cyberbullying/cyberharassment, cyberstalking, child exploitation,
cyberextortion, cyberfraud, illegal surveillance, identity theft,
intellectual property/copyright violations, cyberespionage,
cybersabotage and cyberterrorism. Each of these forms of criminal or
antisocial behavior has a history that well pre-dates Web 2.0
standards, and philosophers have tended to leave the specific
correlations between cybercrime and SNS as an empirical matter for
social scientists, law enforcement and Internet security firms to
investigate. Nevertheless, cybercrime is an enduring topic of
philosophical interest for the broader field of computer ethics, and
the migration to and evolution of such crime on SNS platforms raises
new and distinctive ethical issues.

Among those of great ethical importance is the question of how SNS
providers ought to respond to government demands for user data for
investigative or counterterrorism purposes. SNS providers are caught
between the public interest in crime prevention and their need to
preserve the trust and loyalty of their users, many of whom view
governments as overreaching in their attempts to secure records of
online activity. Many companies have opted to favor user security by
employing end-to-end encryption of SNS exchanges, much to the chagrin
of government agencies who insist upon ‘backdoor’ access
to user data in the interests of public safety and national
security.

A related feature of SNS abuse and cybercrime is the associated
skyrocketing need for content moderation at scale by these platforms.
Because automated tools for content moderation remain crude and easily
gamed, social media platforms rely on large human workforces working
for low wages, who must manually screen countless images of horrific
violence and abuse, often suffering grave and lasting psychological
harm as a result (Roberts 2019). It is unclear how such harms to the
content moderating workforce can be morally justified, even if they
help to prevent the spread of such harm to others. The arrangement has
uncomfortable echoes of Ursula LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk
Away From Omelas; so should platform users be the ones walking
away? Or do platforms have an ethical duty to find a morally
permissible solution, even if it endangers their business model?

Another emerging ethical concern is the increasingly political
character of cyberharassment and cyberstalking. In the U.S., women who
spoke out about the lack of diversity in the tech and videogame
industries were early targets during online controversies such as
2014’s ‘Gamergate’ (Salter 2017), during which some
victims were forced to cancel speaking appearances or leave their
homes due to physical threats after their addresses and other personal
info were posted on social media (a practice known as
‘doxing’ or ‘doxxing’). More recently,
journalists have been doxed and subjected to violent threats,
sometimes following accusations that their reporting itself
constituted doxing (Wilson 2018).

Doxing presents complex ethical challenges (Douglas 2016). For victims
of doxing and associated cyberthreats, traditional law enforcement
bodies offer scant protection, as these agencies are often
ill-equipped to police the blurry boundary between online and physical
harms. But moreover, it’s not always clear what distinguishes
immoral doxing from justified social opprobrium. If someone records a
woman spitting racial epithets in a passerby’s face, or a man
denying a disabled person service in a restaurant, and the victim or
an observer posts the video online in a manner that allows the
perpetrator to be identified by others in their social network, is
that unethical shaming or just deserts? What’s the difference
between posting someone’s home address, allowing them and their
family to be terrorized by a mob, and posting someone’s
workplace so that their employer can consider their conduct? Cases
such as these get adjudicated by ad hoc social media juries
weekly. Sometimes legal consequences do follow, as in the case of the
notorious Amy Cooper, who in 2020 was charged with filing a false
police report after being filmed by a Black man who she falsely
accused of threatening her in Central Park. Are doxing and other modes
of social media shaming legitimate tools of justice? Or are they
indications of the dangers of unregulated moral policing? And if the
answer is ‘both,’ or ‘it depends,’ then what
are the key moral distinctions that allow us to respond appropriately
to this new practice?

A host of metaethical questions are raised by the rapid emergence of
SNS. For example, SNS lend new data to an earlier philosophical debate
(Tavani 2005; Moor 2008) about whether classical ethical traditions
such as utilitarianism, Kantian ethics or virtue ethics possess
sufficient resources for illuminating the implications of emerging
information technology for moral values,
or whether we require a new ethical framework to handle such
phenomena. Charles Ess (2006, 2021) has suggested that a new,
pluralistic “global information ethics” may be the
appropriate context from which to view novel information technologies.
Other scholars have suggested that technologies such as SNS invite
renewed attention to existing ethical approaches such as
pragmatism
(van den Eede 2010),
virtue ethics
(Vallor 2016)
feminist or care ethics
(Hamington 2010; Puotinen 2011) that have often been neglected by
applied ethicists in favor of conventional utilitarian and
deontological resources.

A related metaethical project relevant to SNS is the development of an
explicitly intercultural information ethics (Ess 2005a;
Capurro 2008; Honglaradom and Britz 2010). SNS and other emerging
information technologies do not reliably confine themselves to
national or cultural boundaries, and this creates a particular
challenge for applied ethicists. For example, SNS practices in
different countries must be analyzed against a conceptual background
that recognizes and accommodates complex differences in moral norms
and practices (Capurro 2005; Hongladarom 2007, Wong 2013). SNS
phenomena that one might expect to benefit from intercultural analysis
include: varied cultural patterns and preference/tolerance for
affective display, argument and debate, personal exposure, expressions
of political, interfamilial or cultural criticism, religious
expression and sharing of intellectual property. Alternatively, the
very possibility of a coherent information ethics may come under
challenge, for example, from a
constructivist
view that emerging socio-technological practices like SNS continually
redefine ethical norms—such that our analyses of SNS
and related technologies are not only doomed to operate from shifting
ground, but from ground that is being shifted by the intended
object of our ethical analysis.

Finally, there are pressing practical concerns about whether and how
philosophers can actually have an impact on the ethical profile of
emerging technologies such as SNS. If philosophers direct their
ethical analyses only to other philosophers, then such analyses may
function simply as ethical postmortems of human-technology relations,
with no opportunity to actually pre-empt, reform or redirect unethical
technological practices. But to whom else can, or should, these
ethical concerns be directed: SNS users? Regulatory bodies and
political institutions? SNS software developers? How can the
theoretical content and practical import of these analyses be made
accessible to these varied audiences? What motivating force are they
likely to have?

These questions have become particularly acute of late with the
controversy over alleged corporate capture by technology companies of
the language of ethics, and associated charges of
‘ethics-washing’ (Green 2021 [Other Internet Resources],
Bietti 2020). Some argue that ethics is the wrong tool to fight the
harms of emerging technologies and large technology platforms (Hao
2021); yet alternative proposals to focus on justice, rights, harms,
equity or the legitimate use of power unwittingly fall right back
within the normative scope of ethics. Unless we resort to a cynical
frame of ‘might makes right,’ there is no escaping the
need to use ethics to distinguish the relationships with
sociotechnical phenomena and powers that we regard as permissible,
good, or right, from those that should be resisted and dismantled.

The profound urgency of this task becomes apparent once we recognize
that unlike those ‘life or death’ ethical dilemmas with
which many applied ethicists are understandably often preoccupied
(e.g., abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment), emerging
information technologies such as SNS have in a very short time worked
themselves into the daily moral fabric of virtually all of our lives,
transforming the social landscape and the moral habits and
practices with which we navigate it. The ethical concerns illuminated
here are, in a very real sense, anything but ‘academic,’
and neither philosophers nor the broader human community can afford
the luxury of treating them as such.