Design Factors of Ethics and Responsibility in Social Media: A Systematic Review of Literature and Expert Review of Guiding Principles

ABSTRACT

Large-scale social media services have been challenged due to their lack of ethical principles, which has resulted in allegations of user manipulation such as propagation of fake news related to COVID-19 vaccination and biased algorithmic curations that lead to social polarization. We studied current social media community guidelines and conducted a systematic literature review to identify the core values needed for the establishment of guidelines for responsible social media services. Through expert interviews, a framework and guidelines are proposed for each of three areas: protecting privacy, raising awareness, and controlling abuse. We present each set of guidelines with executable principles and relevant design interventions that practitioners can use to offer responsible social media services. Our expert interviews surfaced tensions between the three areas that need to be addressed in developing responsible social media, such as privacy vs. sharing information, pseudonymity vs. safety, and spreading information vs. safety.

KEYWORDS:

• social media
• responsibility
• ethics
• design guidelines
• systematic literature review
• expert review

Acknowledgments

We sincerely appreciate the seven experts who gave valuable comments that made this research meaningful. We also thank the editor and the reviewers for their insightful feedback on the earlier version of this paper. Finally, we would like to acknowledge The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and its School of Design for their general support as well as the financial support in the form of Research Studentship funded by the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong.

Disclosure statement

This research was funded by University Grants Committee of Hong Kong in the form of Research Studentship.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Covid misinformation on Facebook is killing people – Biden: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57870778

² WhatsApp Help Center: https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/chats/about-forwarding-limits/?lang=en

³ Twitter Support: https://twitter.com/twittersupport/status/1270783537667551233?lang=en