From The Guardian
Facebook has a new process for discussing ethics. But is it ethical?
By Anna Lauren Hoffmann
When Facebook was revealed to have been experimenting on the emotional state of 700,000 of its users back in June 2014, many were outraged that the company had violated ethical guidelines and “harmed” its users.
The fallout of that “emotional contagion study” haunts Facebook’s reputation among ethicists and researchers. But it has also compelled the company to clean up its ethical act, and inspired the introduction of a newly developed internal ethics review process this week....
But how does Facebook translate broad ethical values of respect, diversity, beneficence and justice, for example, into its decision making for research around specific audiences, projects or products? From Facebook’s new process, it is not entirely clear....
Anna Lauren Hoffmann is a postdoctoral scholar and instructor at the UC Berkeley School of Information.