Applying an Ethics of Care to Internet Research: Gamergate and Digital Humanities

Todd Suomela, Bucknell University
Florence Chee, Loyola University Chicago
Bettina Berendt, KU Leuven
Geoffrey Rockwell, University of Alberta Edmonton

Author Posting. © The Authors 2019. This article is posted here for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, 2019, https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.302

Abstract

This article examines key ethical issues that are continuing to emerge from the task of archiving data scraped from online sources such as social media sites, blogs, and forums, particularly pertaining to online harassment and hostile groups. Given the proliferation of digital social data, an understanding of ethics and data stewardship that evolves alongside the shifting landscape of digital societies is indeed essential. Our study involves a primary research archive that is comprised of data scraped from our project concerning the case study of Gamergate, which involved numerous instances of hate speech in various online communities. Doing this type of qualitative research presents advantages for humanities and social science research because it is possible to generate large and rich corpora about subjects of human interest. However, such data scraping has also raised ethical issues around treating social media authors as research subjects and, moreover, as subjects who have provided informed consent. Once researchers consider content creators on these sites as human research subjects, what would best efforts adhering to the directive to “do no harm” look like?