2.2. Ethics#

As we look at social media, we will be looking at ethical concerns around decisions be social media users, designers, moderators, etc.

So what is ethics1?

1

English language note: As you may notice here, ‘ethics’ is, by convention, a singular word. An ‘ethics’ is a way of describing how people think about something. There is also a word, ‘ethic’, but that has different usage. So for example, someone’s ‘work ethic’ is different from the ‘ethics of work’ to which they might subscribe. On a related note, some people will tell you that ‘data’ and ‘media’ are both plural. These words come from Latin, and those word forms are indeed plural in Latin! But we are using English, and conventions vary as to whether these terms should be treated as grammatically plural or singular. You will see variation in how people use these forms in your studies (and perhaps even in this book!), but it should not alarm you. The rule of thumb is to be consistent across a document or project in how you treat such things, so we have tried to be consistent in this book, with the exception of where we are quoting someone else’s words. TODO: decide whether we will treat media and data as plural or singular, and ensure compliance