Social Media to Social Media Analytics: Ethical Challenges

With the amplification of social media platforms, the importance of social media analytics has exponentially increased for many brands and organizations across the world. Tracking and analyzing the social media data has been contributing as a success parameter for such organizations, however, the data is being poorly harnessed. Therefore, the ethical implications of social media analytics need to be identified and explored for both the organizations and targeted users of social media data. The present work is an exploratory study to identify the various techno-ethical concerns of social media engagement, as well as social media analytics. The impact of these concerns on the individuals, organizations, and society as a whole are discussed. Ethical engagement for the most common social media platforms has been outlined with a number of specific examples to understand the prominent techno-ethical concerns. Both the individual and organizational perspectives have been taken into account to identify the implications of social media analytics.