The Ethics of Doing Web Science Research

The panel continues the discussion of ethics within web science from previous years. Beyond fundamental notions such as privacy and intellectual property new challenges arise continuously for researchers as new technologies, platforms, contingencies and people become involved in building the web. Examples for ethical challenges include crowdsourcing as a method, social media data sharing, and, most recently, social media reliability. In the face of ‘fake news’, trolling, cyberbullying and automated content the question is whom to trust: are social media more or less reliable than traditional media? who should regulate their content? using which criteria? and what is the impact on research?