In the 21^st century, new media technologies for socialnetworking such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube began totransform the social, political and informational practices ofindividuals and institutions across the globe, inviting philosophicalresponses from the community of applied ethicists and philosophers oftechnology. While scholarly responses to social media continue to bechallenged by the rapidly evolving nature of these technologies, theurgent need for attention to the social networking phenomenon isunderscored by the fact that it has profoundly reshaped how many humanbeings initiate and/or maintain virtually every type of ethicallysignificant social bond or role: friend-to-friend, parent-to-child,co-worker-to co-worker, employer-to-employee, teacher-to-student,neighbor-to-neighbor, seller-to-buyer, doctor-to-patient, andvoter-to-voter, to offer just a partial list. Nor are the ethicalimplications of these technologies strictly interpersonal, as it hasbecome evident that social networking services (hereafter referred toas SNS) and other new digital media have profound implications fordemocracy, public institutions and the rule of law. The complex web ofinteractions between SNS developers and users, and their online andoffline communities, corporations and governments—along with thediverse and sometimes conflicting motives and interests of thesevarious stakeholders—will continue to require rigorous ethicalanalysis for decades to come.

Section 1 of the entry outlines the history and working definition ofsocial networking services. Section 2 identifies the earlyphilosophical foundations of reflection on the ethics of online socialnetworks, leading up to the emergence of Web 2.0 standards (supportinguser interactions) and full-fledged SNS. Section 3 reviews the primaryethical topic areas around which philosophical reflections on SNShave, to date, converged: privacy; identity and community; friendship,virtue and the good life; democracy, free speech,misinformation/disinformation and the public sphere; and cybercrime.Finally, Section 4 reviews some of the metaethical issues potentiallyimpacted by the emergence of SNS.

• 1. History and Definitions of Social Networking Services
  • 1.1 Online Social Networks and the Emergence of ‘Web 2.0’
  • 1.2 Early Scholarly Engagement with Social Networking Services
• 2. Early Philosophical Concerns about Online Social Networks
  • 2.1 Borgmann’s Critique of Social Hyperreality
  • 2.2 Hubert Dreyfus on Internet Sociality: Anonymity versus Commitment
  • 2.3 Contemporary Reassessment of Early Phenomenological Critiques of SNS
    • 2.3.1 Borgmann, Dreyfus and the ‘Cancel Culture’ Debates
    • 2.3.2 The Civic Harms of Social Hyperreality
• 3. Contemporary Ethical Concerns about Social Networking Services
  • 3.1 Social Networking Services and Privacy
  • 3.2 The Ethics of Identity and Community on Social Networking Services
  • 3.3 Friendship, Virtue and the Good Life on Social Networking Services
  • 3.4 Democracy, Freedom and Social Networking Services in the Public Sphere
  • 3.5 Social Networking Services and Cybercrime
• 4. Social Networking Services and Metaethical Issues
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. History and Definitions of Social Networking Services

‘Social networking’ is an inherently ambiguous termrequiring some clarification. Human beings have been socially‘networked’ in one manner or another for as long as wehave been on the planet, and we have historically availed ourselves ofmany successive techniques and instruments for facilitating andmaintaining such networks. These include structured socialaffiliations and institutions such as private and public clubs, lodgesand churches as well as communications technologies such as postal andcourier systems, telegraphs and telephones. When philosophers speaktoday, however, of ‘Social Networking and Ethics’, theyusually refer more narrowly to the ethical impact of an evolving andloosely defined group of information technologies, most based on orinspired by the ‘Web 2.0’ software standards that emergedin the first decade of the 21^st century. While the mostwidely used social networking services are free, they operate on largeplatforms that offer a range of related products and services thatunderpin their business models, from targeted advertising and datalicensing to cloud storage and enterprise software. Ethical impacts ofsocial networking services are loosely clustered into three categories– direct impacts of social networking activity itself, indirectimpacts associated with the underlying business models that areenabled by such activity, and structural implications of SNS as novelsociopolitical and cultural forces.

1.1 Online Social Networks and the Emergence of ‘Web 2.0’

Prior to the emergence of Web 2.0 standards, the computer had alreadyserved for decades as a medium for various forms of social networking,beginning in the 1970s with social uses of the U.S. military’sARPANET and evolving to facilitate thousands of Internet newsgroupsand electronic mailing lists, BBS (bulletin board systems), MUDs(multi-user dungeons) and chat rooms dedicated to an eclectic range oftopics and social identities (Barnes 2001; Turkle 1995). These earlycomputer social networks were systems that grew up organically,typically as ways of exploiting commercial, academic or otherinstitutional software for more broadly social purposes. In contrast,Web 2.0 technologies evolved specifically to facilitateuser-generated, collaborative and shared Internet content, and whilethe initial aims of Web 2.0 software developers were still largelycommercial and institutional, the new standards were designedexplicitly to harness the already-evident potential of the Internetfor social networking. Most notably, Web 2.0 social interfacesredefined the social topography of the Internet by enabling users tobuild increasingly seamless connections between their online socialpresence and their existing social networks offline—a trend thatshifted the Internet away from its earlier function as a haven forlargely anonymous or pseudonymous identities formingsuigeneris social networks (Ess 2011).

Starting in the first decade of the 21st century, among the firstwebsites to employ the new standards explicitly for general socialnetworking purposes were Orkut, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo,Habbo and Facebook. Subsequent trends in online social networkinginclude the rise of sites dedicated to media and news sharing(YouTube, Reddit, Flickr, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, TikTok),microblogging (Tumblr, Twitter, Weibo), location-based networking(Foursquare, Loopt, Yelp, YikYak), messaging and VoIP (WhatsApp,Messenger, WeChat), social gaming (Steam, Twitch) and interest-sharing(Pinterest).

1.2 Early Scholarly Engagement with Social Networking Services

Study of the ethical implications of SNS was initially seen as asubpart of Computer and Information Ethics (Bynum 2018). WhileComputer and Information Ethics certainly accommodates aninterdisciplinary approach, its direction and problems were initiallylargely defined by philosophically-trained scholars such as James Moor(1985) and Deborah G. Johnson (1985). Yet this has not been the earlypattern for the ethics of social networking. Partly due to thecoincidence of the social networking phenomenon with the emerginginterdisciplinary social science field of ‘InternetStudies’ (Consalvo and Ess, 2011), the ethical implications ofsocial networking technologies were initially targeted for inquiry bya loose coalition of sociologists, social psychologists,anthropologists, ethnographers, law and media scholars and politicalscientists (see, for example, Giles 2006; Boyd 2007; Ellison et al.2007; Ito 2009). Consequently, philosophers who have turned theirattention to social networking and ethics have had to decide whetherto pursue their inquiries independently, drawing primarily fromtraditional philosophical resources in applied computer ethics and thephilosophy of technology, or to develop their views in consultationwith the growing body of empirical data and conclusions already beinggenerated by other disciplines. While this entry will primarilyconfine itself to reviewing existing philosophical research on socialnetworking ethics, links between those researches and studies in otherdisciplinary contexts remain vital.

Indeed, recent academic and popular debates about the harms andbenefits of large social media platforms have been driven far morevisibly by scholars in sociology (Benjamin 2019), information studies(Roberts 2019), psychology (Zuboff 2019) and other social sciencesthan by philosophers, who remain comparatively disengaged. In turn,rather than engage with philosophical ethics, social scienceresearchers in this field typically anchor normative dimensions oftheir analyses in broader political frameworks of justice and humanrights, or psychological accounts of wellbeing. This has led to agrowing debate about whether philosophical ‘ethics’remains the right lens through which to subject social networkingservices or other emerging technologies to normative critique (Green2021, Other Internet Resources). This debate is driven by severalconcerns. First is the growing professionalization of applied ethics(Stark and Hoffmann 2019) and its perceived detachment from socialcritique. A second concern is the trend of insincere corporateappropriation of the language of ethics for marketing, crisismanagement and public relations purposes, known as‘ethicswashing’ (Bietti 2020). Finally, there is thequestion of whether philosophical theories of ethics, which havetraditionally focused on individual actions, are sufficientlyresponsive to the structural conditions of social injustice that drivemany SNS-associated harms.

2. Early Philosophical Concerns about Online Social Networks

Among the first philosophers to take an interest in the ethicalsignificance of social uses of the Internet were phenomenologicalphilosophers of technology Albert Borgmann and Hubert Dreyfus. Thesethinkers were heavily influenced by Heidegger’s (1954 [1977]) viewof technology as a monolithic force with a distinctive vector ofinfluence, one that tends to constrain or impoverish the humanexperience of reality in specific ways. While Borgmann and Dreyfuswere primarily responding to the immediate precursors of Web 2.0social networks (e.g., chat rooms, newsgroups, online gaming andemail), their conclusions, which aim at online sociality broadlyconstrued, are directly relevant to SNS.

2.1 Borgmann’s Critique of Social Hyperreality

Borgmann’s early critique (1984) of modern technology addressedwhat he called thedevice paradigm, a technologically-driventendency to conform our interactions with the world to a model of easyconsumption. By 1992’sCrossing the Postmodern Divide,however, Borgmann had become more narrowly focused on the ethical andsocial impact of information technologies, employing the concept ofhyperreality to critique (among other aspects of informationtechnology) the way in which online social networks may subvert ordisplace organic social realities by allowing people to “offerone another stylized versions of themselves for amorous or convivialentertainment” (1992, 92) rather than allowing the fullness andcomplexity of their real identities to be engaged. While Borgmannadmits that in itself a social hyperreality seems “morallyinert” (1992, 94), he insists that the ethical danger ofhyperrealities lies in their tendency to leave us “resentful anddefeated” when we are forced to return from their“insubstantial and disconnected glamour” to the organicreality which “with all its poverty inescapably asserts itsclaims on us” by providing “the tasks and blessings thatcall forth patience and vigor in people.” (1992, 96)

There might be an inherent ambiguity in Borgmann’s analysis,however. On the one hand he tells us that it is thecompetition with our organic and embodied social presencethat makes online social environments designed for convenience,pleasure and ease ethically problematic, since the latter willinevitably be judged more satisfying than the ‘real’social environment. But he goes on to claim that online socialenvironments arethemselves ethically deficient:

Those who become present via a communication link have a diminishedpresence, since we can always make them vanish if their presencebecomes burdensome. Moreover, we can protect ourselves from unwelcomepersons altogether by using screening devices….The extendednetwork of hyperintelligence also disconnects us from the people wewould meet incidentally at concerts, plays and political gatherings.As it is, we are always and already linked to the music andentertainment we desire and to sources of political information. Thisimmobile attachment to the web of communication works a twofolddeprivation in our lives. It cuts us off from the pleasure of seeingpeople in the round and from the instruction of being seen and judgedby them. It robs us of the social resonance that invigorates ourconcentration and acumen when we listen to music or watch aplay.…Again it seems that by having our hyperintelligent eyesand ears everywhere, we can attain world citizenship of unequaledscope and subtlety. But the world that is hyperintelligently spreadout before us has lost its force and resistance. (1992, 105–6)

Critics of Borgmann saw him as adopting Heidegger’s (1954 [1977])substantivist, monolithic model of technology as a singular,deterministic force in human affairs (Feenberg 1999; Verbeek 2005).This model, known astechnological determinism, representstechnology as an independent driver of social and cultural change,shaping human institutions, practices and values in a manner largelybeyond our control. Whether or not this is ultimately Borgmann’sview (or Heidegger’s), his critics saw it in remarks of thefollowing sort: “[Social hyperreality] has already begun totransform the social fabric…At length it will lead to adisconnected, disembodied, and disoriented sort of life…It isobviously growing and thickening, suffocating reality and renderinghumanity less mindful and intelligent.” (Borgmann 1992,108–9)

Critics asserted that Borgmann’s analysis suffered from his lackof attention to the substantive differences between particular socialnetworking technologies and their varied contexts of use, as well asthe different motivations and patterns of activity displayed byindividual users in those contexts. For example, Borgmann neglectedthe fact that physical reality does not always enable or facilitateconnection, nor does it do so equally for all persons. For example,those who live in remote rural areas, neurodivergent persons, disabledpersons and members of socially marginalized groups are often not wellserved by the affordances of physical social spaces. As a consequence,Andrew Feenberg (1999) claims that Borgmann overlooked how onlinesocial networks can supply sites of democratic resistance for thosewho are physically or politically disempowered by many‘real-world’ networks.

2.2 Hubert Dreyfus on Internet Sociality: Anonymity versus Commitment

Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus (2001) shared Borgmann’s earlycritical suspicion of the ethical possibilities of the Internet; likeBorgmann, Dreyfus’s reflections on the ethical dimension ofonline sociality conveyed a view of such networks as an impoverishedsubstitute for the real thing. Like Borgmann, Dreyfus’ssuspicion was informed by his phenomenological roots, which led him tofocus his critical attention on the Internet’s suspension offully embodied presence. Yet rather than draw upon Heidegger’smetaphysical framework, Dreyfus (2004) reached back to Kierkegaard informing his criticisms of life online. Dreyfus asserts that whatonline engagements intrinsically lack is exposure torisk,and without risk, Dreyfus tells us, there can be no true meaning orcommitment found in the electronic domain. Instead, we are drawn toonline social environments precisely because they allow us toplay with notions of identity, commitment and meaning,without risking the irrevocable consequences that ground realidentities and relationships. As Dreyfus put it:

…the Net frees people to develop new and exciting selves. Theperson living in the aesthetic sphere of existence would surely agree,but according to Kierkegaard, “As a result of knowing and beingeverything possible, one is in contradiction with oneself”(Present Age, 68). When he is speaking from the point of view of thenext higher sphere of existence, Kierkegaard tells us that the selfrequires not “variableness and brilliancy,” but“firmness, balance, and steadiness” (Dreyfus 2004, 75)

While Dreyfus acknowledges that unconditional commitment andacceptance of risk are not excluded inprinciple by onlinesociality, he insists that “anyone using the Net who was led torisk his or her real identity in the real world would have to actagainst the grain of what attracted him or her to the Net in the firstplace” (2004, 78).

2.3 Contemporary Reassessment of Early Phenomenological Critiques of SNS

While Borgmann and Dreyfus’s views continue to inform thephilosophical conversation about social networking and ethics, both ofthese early philosophical engagements with the phenomenon manifestcertain predictive failures (as is perhaps unavoidable when reflectingon new and rapidly evolving technological systems). Dreyfus did notforesee the way in which popular SNS such as Facebook, LinkedIn andTwitter would shift away from the earlier online norms of anonymityand identity play, instead giving real-world identities an onlinepresence which in some ways is less ephemeral than bodily presence (asthose who have struggled to erase online traces of past tweets or todelete Facebook profiles of deceased loved ones can attest).

Likewise, Borgmann’s critiques of “immobileattachment” to the online datastream did not anticipate the riseof mobile social networking applications which not only encourage usto physically seek out and join our friends at those same concerts,plays and political events that he envisioned us passively digestingfrom an electronic feed, but also enable spontaneous physicalgatherings in ways never before possible. That said, such short-termpredictive failures may not, in the long view, turn out to be fatal totheir legacies. After all, some of the most enthusiastic champions ofthe Internet’s liberating social possibilities to be challengedby Dreyfus (2004, 75), such as Sherry Turkle, have since articulatedfar more pessimistic views of the trajectory of new socialtechnologies. Turkle’s concerns about social media in particular(2011, 2015), namely that they foster a peculiar alienation inconnectedness that leaves us feeling “alone together,”resonate well with Borgmann’s earlier warnings about electronicnetworks.

2.3.1 Borgmann, Dreyfus and the ‘Cancel Culture’ Debates

The SNS phenomenon continues to be ambiguous with respect toconfirming Borgmann and Dreyfus’ early predictions. One of theirmost unfounded worries was that online social media would lead to aculture in which personal beliefs and actions are stripped of enduringconsequence, cut adrift from real-world identities as personsaccountable to one another. Today, no regular user of Twitter orReddit is cut off from “the instruction of being seen andjudged” (Borgmann 1992). And contra Dreyfus, it is primarilythrough the power of social media that people’sidentities in the real world are now exposed togreater riskthan before – from doxing to loss of employment to beingphysically endangered by ‘swatting.’

If anything, contemporary debates about social media’s allegedpropagation of a stifling ‘cancel culture,’ which bendback upon the philosophical community itself (Weinberg 2020, OtherInternet Resources), reflect growing anxieties among many that socialnetworking environments primarily lack affordances for forgiveness andmercy, not judgment and personal accountability. Yet others see theemergent phenomenon of online collective judgment as performing avital function of moral and political levelling, one in which socialmedia enable the natural ethical consequences of an agent’sspeech and acts to at last be imposed upon the powerful, not merelythe vulnerable and marginalized.

2.3.2. The Civic Harms of Social Hyperreality

One aspect of Borgmann’s (1992) account has recently reboundedin plausibility; namely, his prediction of a dire decline in civicvirtues among those fully submerged in the distorted political realitycreated by the disembodied and disorienting‘hyperintelligence’ of online social media. In the wake ofthe 2016 UK and US voter manipulation by foreign armies of socialmedia bots, sock puppets, and astroturf accounts, the world has seen arapid global expansion and acceleration of political disinformationand conspiracy theories through online social networks like Facebook,Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp.

The profound harms of the ‘weaponization’ of social mediadisinformation go well beyond voter manipulation. In 2020,disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic greatly impeded publichealth authorities by clouding the public’s perception of theseverity and transmissibility of the virus as well as the utility ofprophylactics such as mask-wearing. Meanwhile, the increasing globalinfluence of ever-mutating conspiracy theories borne on social mediaplatforms by the anonymous group QAnon suggests that Borgmann’swarning of the dangers of our rising culture of‘hyperreality,’ long derided as technophobic ‘moralpanic,’ was dismissed far too hastily. While the notorious‘Pizzagate’ episode of 2016 (Miller 2021) was the firstvisible link between QAnon conspiracies and real-world violence, thealarming uptake in 2020 of QAnon conspiracies by violent right-wingmilitias in the United States led Facebook and Twitter to abandontheir prior tolerance of the movement and ban or limit access tohundreds of thousands of QAnon-associated accounts.

Such moves came too late to stabilize the epistemic and political riftin a shared reality. By late 2020, QAnon had boosted a widelysuccessful effort by supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump tocreate a (manifestly false) counter-narrative around the 2020 electionpurporting that he had actually won, leading to a failed insurrectionat the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Borgmann’s warnings on‘hyperreality’ seem less like moral panic and more likeprescience when one considers the existence of a wide swath ofAmerican voters who remain convinced that Donald Trump remainslegitimately in office, directing actions against his enemies. Suchcounter-narratives are not merely ‘underground’ beliefsystems; they compete directly with reality itself. On June 17, 2021,the mainstream national newspaper USA Today found it necessary topublish a piece titled “Fact Check: Hilary Clinton was nothanged at Guantanamo Bay” (Wagner 2021) in response to a videobeing widely shared on the social media platforms TikTok andInstagram, which describes in fine detail the (very much alive)Clinton’s last meal.

Borgmann’s long-neglected work on social hyperreality thusmerits reevaluation in light of the growing fractures andincoherencies that now splinter and twist our digitally mediatedexperience of what remains, underneath it all, a common world. TheCOVID-19 pandemic and increasingly catastrophic impacts of climatechange testify to humanity’s vital need to remain anchored inand intelligently responsive to a shared physical reality.

Yet both the spread of social media-driven disinformation and the riseof online moral policing reveal an unresolved philosophical tensionthat Borgmann’s own work did not explicitly confront. This istheConcept of Toleration and its Paradoxes, which continue to bedevil modern political thought. Social networkingservices have transformed this festering concern of politicalphilosophy into something verging on an existential crisis. Whenmalice and madness can be amplified on a global scale at lightspeed,in a manner affordable and accessible to anyone with a smartphone orwifi connection, what is too injurious and too irremediable, to besaid, or shared (Marin 2021)?

Social media continue to drive a range of new philosophicalinvestigations in the domains ofsocial epistemology and ethics, including ‘vice epistemology’ (Kidd, Battaly,Cassam 2020). Such investigations raise urgent questions about therelationship between online disinformation/misinformation, individualmoral and epistemic responsibility, and the responsibility of socialmedia platforms themselves. On this point, Regina Rini (2017) hasargued that the problem of online disinformation/misinformation is notproperly conceived in terms of individual epistemic vice, but rathermust be seen as a “tragedy of the epistemic commons” thatwill require institutional and structural solutions.

3. Contemporary Ethical Concerns about Social Networking Services

While early SNS scholarship in the social and natural sciences tendedto focus on SNS impact on users’ psychosocial markers ofhappiness, well-being, psychosocial adjustment, social capital, orfeelings of life satisfaction, philosophical concerns about socialnetworking and ethics have generally centered on topics less amenableto empirical measurement (e.g., privacy, identity, friendship, thegood life and democratic freedom). More so than ‘socialcapital’ or feelings of ‘life satisfaction,’ thesetopics are closely tied to traditional concerns of ethical theory(e.g., virtues, rights, duties, motivations and consequences). Thesetopics are also tightly linked to the novel features and distinctivefunctionalities of SNS, more so than some other issues of interest incomputer and information ethics that relate to more general Internetfunctionalities (for example, issues of copyright and intellectualproperty).

Despite the methodological challenges of applying philosophical theoryto rapidly shifting empirical patterns of SNS influence, philosophicalexplorations of the ethics of SNS have continued in recent years tomove away from Borgmann and Dreyfus’ transcendental-existentialconcerns about the Internet, to the empirically-driven space ofapplied technology ethics. Research in this space explores threeinterlinked and loosely overlapping kinds of ethical phenomena:

• direct ethical impacts of social networking activityitself (just or unjust, harmful or beneficial) on participants as wellas third parties and institutions;
• indirect ethical impacts on society of social networkingactivity, caused by the aggregate behavior of users, platformproviders and/or their agents in complex interactions between theseand other social actors and forces;
• structural impacts of SNS on the ethical shape ofsociety, especially those driven by the dominant surveillant andextractivist value orientations that sustain social networkingplatforms and culture.

Most research in the field, however, remains topic- anddomain-driven—exploring a given potential harm ordomain-specific ethical dilemma that arises from direct, indirect, orstructural effects of SNS, or more often, in combination. Sections3.1–3.5 outline the most widely discussed of contemporarySNS’ ethical challenges.

3.1 Social Networking Services and Privacy

Fundamental practices of concern for direct ethical impacts on privacyinclude: the transfer of users’ data to third parties forintrusive purposes, especially marketing, data mining, andsurveillance; the use of SNS data to train facial-recognition systemsor other algorithmic tools that identify, track and profile peoplewithout their free consent; the ability of third-party applications tocollect and publish user data without their permission or awareness;the dominant reliance by SNS on opaque or inadequate privacy settings;the use of ‘cookies’ to track online user activities afterthey have left a SNS; the abuse of social networking tools or data forstalking or harassment; widespread scraping of social media data byacademic researchers for a variety of unconsented purposes;undisclosed sharing of user information or patterns of activity withgovernment entities; and, last but not least, the tendency of SNS tofoster imprudent, ill-informed or unethical information sharingpractices by users, either with respect to their own personal data ordata related to other persons and entities. Facebook has been aparticular lightning-rod for criticism of its privacy practices(Spinello 2011, Vaidhyanathan 2018), but it is just the most visiblemember of a far broader and more complex network of SNS actors withaccess to unprecedented quantities of sensitive personal data.

Indirectly, the incentives of social media environments createparticular problems with respect to privacy norms. For example, sinceit is the ability to access information freely shared by others thatmakes SNS uniquely attractive and useful, and since platforms aregenerally designed to reward disclosure, it turns out that contrary totraditional views of information privacy, giving users greater controlover their information-sharing practices can actually lead todecreased privacy for themselves and others in their network.Indeed, advertisers, insurance companies and employers areincreasingly less interested in knowing the private facts ofindividual users’ lives, and more interested in using their datato train algorithms that can predict the behavior of peopleverymuch like that user. Thus the real privacy risk of our socialmedia practices is often not to ourselves but to other people; if aperson is comfortable with the personal risk of their data sharinghabits, it does not follow that these habits are ethically benign.Moreover, users are still caught in the tension between their personalmotivations for using SNS and the profit-driven motivations of thecorporations that possess their data (Baym 2011, Vaidhyanathan 2018).Jared Lanier frames the point cynically when he states that:“The only hope for social networking sites from a business pointof view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method ofviolating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable” (Lanier2010).

Scholars also note the way in which SNS architectures are oftenstructurally insensitive to the granularity of human sociality (Hull,Lipford & Latulipe 2011). That is, such architectures tend totreat human relations as if they are all of a kind, ignoring theprofound differences among types of social relation (familial,professional, collegial, commercial, civic, etc.). As a consequence,the privacy controls of such architectures often flatten thevariability of privacy norms within different but overlapping socialspheres. Among philosophical accounts of privacy, Nissenbaum’s(2010) view ofcontextual integrity has seemed to many to beparticularly well suited to explaining the diversity and complexity ofprivacy expectations generated by new social media (see for exampleGrodzinsky and Tavani 2010; Capurro 2011). Contextual integritydemands that our information practices respect context-sensitiveprivacy norms, where ‘context’ refers not to the overlycoarse distinction between ‘private’ and‘public,’ but to a far richer array of social settingscharacterized by distinctive roles, norms and values. For example, thesame piece of information made ‘public’ in the context ofa status update to family and friends on Facebook may nevertheless beconsidered by the same discloser to be ‘private’ in othercontexts; that is, she may not expect that same information to beprovided to strangers Googling her name, or to bank employeesexamining her credit history.

On the design side, such complexity means that attempts to producemore ‘user-friendly’ privacy controls face an uphillchallenge—they must balance the need for simplicity and ease ofuse with the need to better represent the rich and complex structuresof our social universes. A key design question, then, is how SNSprivacy interfaces can be made more accessibleand moresocially intuitive for users.

Hull et al. (2011) also take note of the apparent plasticity of userattitudes about privacy in SNS contexts, as evidenced by the patternof widespread outrage over changed or newly disclosed privacypractices of SNS providers being followed by a period of accommodationto and acceptance of the new practices (Boyd and Hargittai 2010). Intheir 2018 bookRe-Engineering Humanity, Brett Frischmann andEvan Selinger argue that SNS contribute to a slippery slope of“techno-social engineering creep” that produces a gradualnormalization of increasingly pervasive and intrusive digitalsurveillance. A related concern is the “privacy paradox,”in which users’ voluntary sharing of data online belies theirown stated values concerning privacy. However, recent data fromApple’s introduction in iOS 14.5 of opt-in for ad tracking,which the vast majority of iOS users have declined to allow, suggeststhat most people continue to value and act to protect their privacy,when given a straightforward choice that does not inhibit their accessto services (Axon 2021). Working from the late writings of Foucault,Hull (2015) has explored the way in which the‘self-management’ model of online privacy protectionembodied in standard ‘notice and consent’ practices onlyreinforces a narrow neoliberal conception of privacy, and ofourselves, as commodities for sale and exchange. The debate continuesabout whether privacy violations can be usefully addressed by usersmaking wiser privacy-preserving choices (Véliz 2021), orwhether the responsibilization of individuals only obscures the urgentneed for radical structural reforms of SNS business models(Vaidhyanathan 2018).

In an early study of online communities, Bakardjieva and Feenberg(2000) suggested that the rise of communities predicated on the openexchange of information may in fact require us to relocate our focusin information ethics from privacy concerns to concerns aboutalienation; that is, the exploitation of information forpurposes not intended by the relevant community. Such considerationsgive rise to the possibility of users deploying “guerrillatactics” of misinformation, for example, by providing SNS hostswith false names, addresses, birthdates, hometowns or employmentinformation. Such tactics would aim to subvert the emergence of a new“digital totalitarianism” that uses the power ofinformation rather than physical force as a political control (Capurro2011).

Finally, privacy issues with SNS highlight a broader philosophical andstructural problem involving the intercultural dimensions ofinformation ethics and the challenges for ethical pluralism in globaldigital spaces (Ess 2021). Pak Hang Wong (2013) has argued for theneed for privacy norms to be contextualized in ways that do not imposea culturally hegemonic Western understanding of why privacy matters;for example, in the Confucian context, it is familial privacy ratherthan individual privacy that is of greatest moral concern. RafaelCapurro (2005) has also noted the way in which narrowly Westernconceptions of privacy occlude other legitimate ethical concernsregarding new media practices. For example, he notes that in additionto Western worries about protecting the private domain from publicexposure, we must also take care to protect thepublic spherefrom the excessive intrusion of the private. Though he illustrates thepoint with a comment about intrusive uses of cell phones in publicspaces (2005, 47), the rise of mobile social networking has amplifiedthis concern by several factors. When one must compete with Facebookor Twitter for the attention of not only one’s dinner companionsand family members, but also one’s fellow drivers, pedestrians,students, moviegoers, patients and audience members, the integrity ofthe public sphere comes to look as fragile as that of the private.

3.2 The Ethics of Identity and Community on Social Networking Services

Social networking technologies open up a new type of ethical space inwhich personal identities and communities, both ‘real’ andvirtual, are constructed, presented, negotiated, managed andperformed. Accordingly, philosophers have analyzed SNS both in termsof their uses as Foucaultian “technologies of the self”(Bakardjieva and Gaden 2012) that facilitate the construction andperformance of personal identity, and in terms of the distinctivekinds of communal norms and moral practices generated by SNS (Parsell2008).

The ethical and metaphysical issues generated by the formation ofvirtual identities and communities have attracted much philosophicalinterest (see Introna 2011 and Rodogno 2012). Yet as noted by PatrickStokes (2012), unlike earlier forms of online community in whichanonymity and the construction of alter-egos were typical, SNS such asFacebook increasingly anchor member identities and connections toreal, embodied selves and offline ‘real-world’ networks.Yet SNS still enable users to directly manage their self-presentationand their social networks in ways that offline social spaces at home,school or work often do not permit. The result, then, is an identitygrounded in the person’s material reality and embodiment butmore explicitly “reflective and aspirational” (Stokes2012, 365) in its presentation, a phenomenon encapsulated in socialmedia platforms such as Instagram. This raises a number of ethicalquestions: first, from what source of normative guidance or value doesthe aspirational content of an SNS user’s identity primarilyderive? Do identity performances on SNS generally represent the sameaspirations and reflect the same value profiles as users’offline identity performances? Do they display any notable differencesfrom the aspirational identities of non-SNS users? Are the values andaspirations made explicit in SNS contexts more or less heteronomous inorigin than those expressed in non-SNS contexts? Do the moreexplicitly aspirational identity performances on SNS encourage usersto take steps to actually embody those aspirations offline, or do theytend to weaken the motivation to do so?

A further SNS phenomenon of relevance here is the persistence andcommunal memorialization of Facebook profiles after the user’sdeath; not only does this reinvigorate a number of classical ethicalquestions about our ethical duties to honor and remember the dead, italso renews questions about whether our moral identities can persistafter our embodied identities expire, and whether the dead haveongoing interests in their social presence or reputation (Stokes2012).

Mitch Parsell (2008) raised early concerns about the uniquetemptations of ‘narrowcast’ social networking communitiesthat are “composed of those just like yourself, whatever youropinion, personality or prejudices.” (41) Such worries about‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ have onlybecome more acute as political polarization continues to dominateonline culture. Among the structural affordances of SNS is a tendencyto constrict our identities to a closed set of communal norms thatperpetuate increased polarization, prejudice and insularity. Parsellsadmitted thatin theory the many-to-many or one-to-manyrelations enabled by SNS allow for exposure to a greater variety ofopinions and attitudes, butin practice they often have theopposite effect. Building from de Laat (2006), who suggests thatmembers of virtual communities embrace a distinctlyhyperactive style of communication to compensate fordiminished informational cues, Parsell claimed that in the absence ofthe full range of personal identifiers evident through face-to-facecontact, SNS may also indirectly promote thedeindividuationof personal identity by exaggerating and reinforcing the significanceof singular shared traits (liberal, conservative, gay, Catholic, etc.)that lead us to see ourselves and our SNS contacts more asrepresentatives of a group than as unique persons (2008, 46).

Parsell also noted the existence ofinherently perniciousidentities and communities that may be enabled or enhanced by SNStools—he cites the example of apotemnophiliacs, or would-beamputees, who use such resources to create mutually supportivenetworks in which their self-destructive desires receive validation(2008, 48). Related concerns have been raised about“Pro-ANA” sites that provide mutually supportive networksfor anorexics seeking information and tools to allow them toperpetuate disordered and self-harming identities (Giles 2006;Manders-Huits 2010).

Restraint of such affordances necessarily comes at some cost to userautonomy—a value that in other circumstances is critical torespecting the ethical demands of identity, as noted by NoemiManders-Huits (2010). Manders-Huits explores the tension between theway in which SNS treat users as profiled and forensicallyreidentifiable “objects of (algorithmic) computation”(2010, 52) while at the same time offering those users an attractivespace for ongoing identity construction. She argues that SNSdevelopers have a duty to protect and promote the interests of theirusers in autonomously constructing and managing their own moral andpractical identities. This autonomy exists in some tension withwidespread but still crude practices of automated SNS contentmoderation that seek on the one hand, to preserve a ’safe’space for expression, yet may disproportionately suppress marginalizedidentities (Gillespie 2020).

The ethical concern about SNS constraints on user autonomy is alsovoiced by Bakardjieva and Gaden (2012) who note that whether they wishtheir identities to be formed and used in this manner or not, theonline selves of SNS users are constituted by the categoriesestablished by SNS developers, and ranked and evaluated according tothe currency which primarily drives the narrow “moraleconomy” of SNS communities: popularity (2012, 410). They note,however, that users are not rendered wholly powerless by this schema;users retain, and many exercise, “the liberty to make informedchoices and negotiate the terms of their self-constitution andinteraction with others,” (2012, 411) whether by employing meansto resist the “commercial imperatives” of SNS sites(ibid.) or by deliberately restricting the scope and extent of theirpersonal SNS practices.

SNS can also enable authenticity in important ways. While a‘Timeline’ feature that displays my entire online personalhistory for all my friends to see can prompt me to ‘edit’my past, it can also prompt me to face up to and assimilate into myself-conception thoughts and actions that might otherwise beconveniently forgotten. The messy collision of my family, friends andcoworkers on Facebook can be managed with various tools offered by thesite, allowing me to direct posts only to specific sub-networks that Idefine. But the far simpler and less time-consuming strategy is tocome to terms with the collision—allowing each network member toget a glimpse of who I am to others, while at the same time askingmyself whether these expanded presentations project a person that ismore multidimensional and interesting, or one that is manifestlyinsincere. As Tamara Wandel and Anthony Beavers put it:

I am thus no longer radically free to engage in creating a completelyfictive self, I must become someone real, not who I really am pregivenfrom the start, but who I am allowed to be and what I am able tonegotiate in the careful dynamic between who I want to be and who myfriends from these multiple constituencies perceive me, allow me, andneed me to be. (2011, 93)

Even so, Dean Cocking (2008) has argued that many online socialenvironments, by amplifying active aspects of self-presentation underour direct control, compromise the important function ofpassive modes of embodied self-presentation beyond ourconscious control, such as body language, facial expression, andspontaneous displays of emotion (130). He regards these as importantindicators of character that play a critical role in how others seeus, and by extension, how we come to understand ourselves throughothers’ perceptions and reactions. If Cocking’s view iscorrect, then SNS that privilege text-based and asynchronouscommunications may hamper our ability to cultivate and expressauthentic identities. The subsequent rise in popularity of video andlivestream SNS services such as YouTube, TikTok, Stream and Twitchmight therefore be seen as enabling of greater authenticity inself-presentation. Yet in reality, the algorithmic and profitincentives of these platforms have been seen to reward distortedpatterns of expression: compulsive, ‘always performing’norms that are reported to contribute to burnout and breakdown bycontent creators (Parkin 2018).

Ethical preoccupations with the impact of SNS on our authenticself-constitution and representation may be assuming a false dichotomybetween online and offline identities; the informational theory ofpersonal identity offered by Luciano Floridi (2011) problematizes thisdistinction. Soraj Hongladarom (2011) employs such an informationalmetaphysic to deny that any clear boundary can be drawn between ouroffline selves and our selves as cultivated through SNS. Instead, ourpersonal identities online and off are taken as externally constitutedby our informational relations to other selves, events andobjects.

Likewise, Charles Ess makes a link between relational models of theself found in Aristotle, Confucius and many contemporary feministthinkers and emerging notions of the networked individual as a“smeared-out self” (2010, 111) constituted by a shiftingweb of embodied and informational relations. Ess points out that byundermining the atomic and dualistic model of the self upon whichWestern liberal democracies are founded, this new conception of theself forces us to reassess traditional philosophical approaches toethical concerns about privacy and autonomy—and may even promotethe emergence of a much-needed “global information ethics”(2010, 112). Yet he worries that our ‘smeared-out selves’may lose coherence as the relations that constitute us areincreasingly multiplied and scattered among a vast and expanding webof networked channels. Can such selves retain the capacities ofcritical rationality required for the exercise of liberal democracy,or will our networked selves increasingly be characterized bypolitical and intellectual passivity, hampered in self-governance by“shorter attention spans and less capacity to engage withcritical argument” (2010, 114)? Ess suggests that we hope for,and work to enable the emergence of, ‘hybrid selves’ thatcultivate the individual moral and practical virtues needed toflourish within our networked and embodied relations (2010, 116).

3.3 Friendship, Virtue and the Good Life on Social Networking Services

SNS can facilitate many types of relational connections: LinkedInencourages social relations organized around our professional lives,Twitter is useful for creating lines of communication between ordinaryindividuals and figures of public interest, MySpace was for a time apopular way for musicians to promote themselves and communicate withtheir fans, and Facebook, which began as a way to link universitycohorts and now connects people across the globe, also hosts businessprofiles aimed at establishing links to existing and future customers.Yet the overarching relational concept in the SNS universe has been,and continues to be, the ‘friend,’ as underscored by thenow-common use of this term as a verb to refer to acts of instigatingor confirming relationships on SNS.

This appropriation and expansion of the concept ‘friend’by SNS has provoked a great deal of scholarly interest fromphilosophers and social scientists, more so than any other ethicalconcern except perhaps privacy. Early concerns about SNS friendshipcentered on the expectation that such sites would be used primarily tobuild ‘virtual’ friendships between physically separatedindividuals lacking a ‘real-world’ or‘face-to-face’ connection. This perception was anunderstandable extrapolation from earlier patterns of Internetsociality, patterns that had prompted philosophical worries aboutwhether online friendships could ever be ‘as good as the realthing’ or were doomed to be pale substitutes for embodied‘face to face’ connections (Cocking and Matthews 2000).This view was robustly opposed by Adam Briggle (2008), who claimedthat online friendships might enjoy certain unique advantages. Forexample, Briggle asserted that friendships formed online might be morecandid than offline ones, thanks to the sense of security provided byphysical distance (2008, 75). He also noted the way in whichasynchronous written communications can promote more deliberate andthoughtful exchanges (2008, 77).

These sorts of questions about how online friendships measure up tooffline ones, along with questions about whether or to what extentonline friendships encroach upon users’ commitments to embodied,‘real-world’ relations with friends, family members andcommunities, defined the ethical problem-space of online friendship asSNS began to emerge. But it did not take long for empirical studies ofactual SNS usage trends to force a profound rethinking of thisproblem-space. Within five years of Facebook’s launch, it wasevident that a significant majority of SNS users were relying on thesesites primarily to maintain and enhance relationships with those withwhom they also had a strong offline connection—including closefamily members, high-school and college friends and co-workers(Ellison, Steinfeld and Lampe 2007; Ito et al. 2009; Smith 2011). Norare SNS used to facilitate purely online exchanges—many SNSusers today rely on the sites’ functionalities to organizeeverything from cocktail parties to movie nights, outings to athleticor cultural events, family reunions and community meetings. Mobile SNSapplications amplify this type of functionality further, by enablingfriends to locate one another in their community in real-time,enabling spontaneous meetings at restaurants, bars and shops thatwould otherwise happen only by coincidence.

Yet lingering ethical concerns remain about the way in which SNS candistract users from the needs of those in their immediate physicalsurroundings (consider the widely lamented trend of users obsessivelychecking their social media feeds during family dinners, businessmeetings, romantic dates and symphony performances). Such phenomena,which scholars like Sherry Turkle (2011, 2015) continue to worry areindicative of a growing cultural tolerance for being ‘alonetogether,’ bring a new complexity to earlier philosophicalconcerns about the emergence of a zero-sum game between offlinerelationships and their virtual SNS competitors. They have alsoprompted a shift of ethical focus away from the question of whetheronline relationships are “real” friendships (Cocking andMatthews 2000), to how well the real friendships we bring to SNS arebeing served there (Vallor 2012). The debate over the value andquality of online friendships continues (Sharp 2012; Froding andPeterson 2012; Elder 2014; Turp 2020; Kristjánsson 2021); inlarge part because the typical pattern of those friendships, like mostsocial networking phenomena, continues to evolve.

Such concerns intersect with broader philosophical questions aboutwhether and how the classical ethical ideal of ‘the goodlife’ can be engaged in the 21^st century. Pak-HangWong claims that this question requires us to broaden the standardapproach to information ethics from a narrow focus on the“right/the just” (2010, 29) that defines ethical actionnegatively (e.g., in terms of violations of privacy,copyright, etc.) to a framework that conceives of apositiveethical trajectory for our technological choices; for example, theethical opportunity to foster compassionate and caring communities, orto create an environmentally sustainable economic order. Edward Spence(2011) further suggests that to adequately address the significance ofSNS and related information and communication technologies for thegood life, we must also expand the scope of philosophical inquirybeyond its present concern with narrowly interpersonal ethics to themore universal ethical question ofprudential wisdom. Do SNSand related technologies help us to cultivate the broader intellectualvirtue of knowing what it is to live well, and how to best pursue it?Or do they tend to impede its development?

This concern about prudential wisdom and the good life is part of agrowing philosophical interest in using the resources of classical andcontemporary virtue ethics to evaluate the impact of SNS and relatedtechnologies (Vallor 2016, 2010; Wong 2012; Ess 2008). This program ofresearch promotes inquiry into the impact of SNS not merely on thecultivation of prudential virtue, but on the development of a host ofother moral and communicative virtues, such as honesty, patience,justice, loyalty, benevolence and empathy.

3.4 Democracy, Freedom and Social Networking Services in the Public Sphere

As is the case with privacy, identity, community and friendship onSNS, ethical debates about the impact of SNS on civil discourse,freedom and democracy in the public sphere must be seen as extensionsof a broader discussion about the political implications of theInternet, one that predates Web 2.0 standards. Much of the literatureon this subject focuses on the question of whether the Internetencourages or hampers the free exercise of deliberative public reason,in a manner informed by Jürgen Habermas’s (1992/1998)account of discourse ethics and deliberative democracy in the publicsphere (Ess 1996 and 2005b; Dahlberg 2001; Bohman 2008). A relatedtopic of concern is SNS fragmentation of the public sphere byencouraging the formation of ‘echo chambers’ and‘filter bubbles’: informational silos for like-mindedindividuals who deliberately shield themselves from exposure toalternative views. Early worries that such insularity would promoteextremism and the reinforcement of ill-founded opinions, while alsopreventing citizens of a democracy from recognizing their sharedinterests and experiences (Sunstein 2008), have unfortunately provento be well-founded (as noted in section 2.3.2). Early optimism thatSNS would facilitate popular revolutions resulting in the overthrow ofauthoritarian regimes (Marturano 2011; Frick and Oberprantacher 2011)have likewise given way to the darker reality that SNS are perhapseven more easily used as tools to popularize authoritarian andtotalitarian movements, or foster genocidal impulses, as in the use ofFacebook to drive violence against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar(BBC 2018).

When SNS in particular are considered in light of these questions,some distinctive considerations arise. First, sites like Facebook andTwitter (as opposed to narrower SNS utilities such as LinkedIn)facilitate the sharing of, and exposure to, an extremely diverse rangeoftypes of discourse. On any given day on Facebook a usermay encounter in her NewsFeed a link to an article in a respectedpolitical magazine followed by a video of a cat in a silly costume,followed by a link to a new scientific study, followed by a lengthystatus update someone has posted about their lunch, followed by aphoto of a popular political figure overlaid with a clever andsubversive caption. Vacation photos are mixed in with political rants,invitations to cultural events, birthday reminders and data-drivengraphs created to undermine common political, moral or economicbeliefs. Thus while a user has a tremendous amount of liberty tochoose which forms of discourse to pay closer attention to, and toolswith which to hide or prioritize the posts of certain members of hernetwork, the sheer diversity of the private and public concerns of herfellows would seem to offer at least some measure of protectionagainst the extreme insularity and fragmentation of discourse that isincompatible with the public sphere.

Yet in practice, the function of hidden platform algorithms can defeatthis diversity. Trained on user behavior to optimize for engagementand other metrics that advertisers and platform companies associatewith their profit, these algorithms can ensure that I experience onlya pale shadow of the true diversity of my social network, seeing atthe top of my feed only those posts that I am most likely to findsubjectively rewarding to engage with. If, for example, I support theBlack Lives Matter movement, and tend to close the app in frustrationand disappointment whenever I see BLM denigrated by someone I considera friend, the platform algorithm can easily learn this association andoptimize my experience for one that is more conducive to retaining mypresence. It is important to note, however, that in this case theeffect is an interaction between the algorithm and my own behavior.How much responsibility for echo chambers and resulting polarizationor insularity falls upon users, and how much on the designers ofalgorithms that track and amplify our expressed preferences?

Philosophers of technology often speak of theaffordances orgradients of particular technologies in given contexts(Vallor 2010) insofar as they make certain patterns of use moreattractive or convenient for users (while not rendering alternativepatterns impossible). Thus while Ican certainly seek outposts that will cause me discomfort or anxiety, the platform gradientwill not be designed to facilitate such experiences. Yet it is notobvious if or when itshould be designed to do so. As AlexisElder notes (2020), civic discourse on social media can be furtheredrather than inhibited by prudent use of tools enabling disconnection.Additionally, a platform affordance that makes a violent whitesupremacist feel accepted, valued, safe and respected in their socialmilieu (preciselyfor their expressed attitudes and beliefsin white supremacist violence) facilitates harm to others, in a waythat a platform affordance that makes an autistic person or atransgender woman feel accepted, valued, safe and respected for whothey are, does not. Fairness and equity in SNS platform design do notentail neutrality. Ethics explicitly demandsnon-neutralitybetween harm and nonharm, between justice and injustice. But ethicsalso requires epistemic anchoring in reality. Thus even if my ownattitudes and beliefs harm no one, I may still have a normativeepistemic duty to avoid the comfort of a filter bubble. Do SNSplatforms have a duty to keep their algorithms from helping me intoone? In truth, those whose identities are historically marginalizedwill rarely have the luxury of the filter bubble option; online andoffline worlds consistently offer stark reminders of theirmarginalization. So how do SNS designers, users, and regulatorsmitigate the deleterious political and epistemic effects of filterbubble phenomena without making platforms more inhospitable tovulnerable groups than they already are?

One must also ask whether SNS can skirt the dangers of a plebiscitemodel of democratic discourse, in which minority voices are dispersedand drowned out by the many. Certainly, compared to the‘one-to-many’ channels of communication favored bytraditional media, SNS facilitate a ‘many-to-many’ modelof communication that appears to lower the barriers to participationin civic discourse for everyone, including the marginalized. However,SNS lack the institutional structures necessary to ensure thatminoritized voices enjoy not onlyfree, but substantivelyequal access to the deliberative function of the publicsphere.

We must also consider the quality of informational exchanges on SNSand the extent to which they promote a genuinelydialogicalanddeliberative public sphere marked by the exercise ofcritical rationality. SNS norms tend to privilege brevity andimmediate impact over substance and depth in communication; Vallor(2012) suggests that this bodes poorly for the cultivation of thosecommunicative virtues essential to a flourishing public sphere. Thisworry is only reinforced by empirical data suggesting that SNSperpetuate the ‘Spiral of Silence’ phenomenon that resultsin the passive suppression of divergent views on matters of importantpolitical or civic concern (Hampton et. al. 2014). In a relatedcritique, Frick and Oberprantacher (2011) claim that the ability ofSNS to facilitate public ‘sharing’ can obscure the deepambiguity between sharing as “a promising, active participatoryprocess” and “interpassive, disjointed acts of havingtriviashared.” (2011, 22)

There remains a notable gap online between the prevalence ofdemocratic discourse and debate—which require only the openvoicing of opinions and reasons, respectively—and the relativeabsence of democraticdeliberation, which requires the jointexercise of collective intentions, cooperation and compromise as wellas a shared sense of reality on which to act. The greatest moralchallenges of our time—responding to the climate change crisis,developing sustainable patterns of economic and social life, managingglobal threats to public health—aren’t going to be solvedby ideological warfare but by deliberative, coordinated exercise ofpublic wisdom. Today’s social media platforms are great forcultivating the former; for the latter, not so much.

Another vital issue for online democracy relates to the contentiousdebate emerging on social media platforms about the extent to whichcontroversial or unpopular speech ought to be tolerated or punished byprivate actors, especially when the consequences manifest intraditional offline contexts and spaces such as the university. Forexample, the norms of academic freedom in the U.S. were greatlydestabilized by the ‘Salaita Affair’ (in which a tenuredjob offer by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to StevenSalaita was withdrawn on the basis of his tweets criticizing Israel)and several other cases in which academics were censured or otherwisepunished by their institutions as a result of their controversialsocial media posts (Protevi 2018). Yet how should we treat a post by aprofessor that expresses a desire to sleep with their students, orthat expresses their doubts about the intelligence of women, or theintegrity of students of a particular nationality? It remains to beseen what equilibrium can be found between moral accountability andfree expression in communities increasingly mediated by SNScommunications. A related debate concerns the ethical and social valueof the kind of social media acts of moral policing frequently deridedas insincere or performative ‘virtue signaling.’ To whatextent are social media platforms a viable stage for moralperformances, and are such performancesmerely performative?Are they inherently ‘grandstanding’ abuses of moraldiscourse (Tosi and Warmke 2020), or can they in fact be positiveforces for social progress and reform (Levy 2020, Westra 2021)?

It also remains to be seen to what extent civic discourse and activismon SNS will continue to be manipulated or compromised by thecommercial interests that currently own and manage the technicalinfrastructure. This concern is driven by the growing economic andpolitical influence of companies in the technology sector, whatLuciano Floridi (2015b) calls ‘grey power,’ and thepotentially disenfranchising and disempowering effects of an economicmodel in which most users play a passive role (Floridi 2015a). Indeed,the relationship between social media users and service providers hasbecome increasingly contentious, as users struggle to demand moreprivacy, better data security and more effective protections fromonline harassment in an economic context where they have little or nodirect bargaining power (Zuboff 2019).

This imbalance was powerfully illustrated by the revelation in 2014that Facebook researchers had quietly conducted psychologicalexperiments on users without their knowledge, manipulating their moodsby altering the balance of positive or negative items in their NewsFeeds (Goel 2014). The study added yet another dimension to existingconcerns about the ethics and validity of social science research thatrelies on SNS-generated data (Buchanan and Zimmer 2012), concerns thatdrive an increasingly vital and contested area of research ethics(Woodfield 2018, franzke et al. 2020).

Ironically, in the power struggle between users and SNS providers,social networking platforms themselves have become the primarybattlefield, where users vent their collective outrage in an attemptto force service providers into responding to their demands. Theresults are sometimes positive, as when Twitter users, after years ofcomplaining, finally shamed the company in 2015 into providing betterreporting tools for online harassment. Yet by its nature the processis chaotic and often controversial, as when later that year, Redditusers successfully demanded the ouster of CEO Ellen Pao, under whoseleadership Reddit had banned some of its more repugnant‘subreddit’ forums (such as “Fat PeopleHate”).

The only clear consensus emerging from the considerations outlinedhere is that if SNS are going to facilitate any enhancement of aHabermasian public sphere, or the civic virtues and praxes of reasoneddiscourse that any functioning public sphere must presuppose, thenusers will have to actively mobilize themselves to exploit such anopportunity (Frick and Oberprantacher 2011). Such mobilization maydepend upon resisting the “false sense of activity andaccomplishment” (Bar-Tura, 2010, 239) that may come from merelyclicking ‘Like’ in response to acts of meaningfulpolitical speech, forwarding calls to sign petitions, or simply‘following’ an outspoken social critic on Twitter whose‘tweeted’ calls to action are drowned in a tide ofcorporate announcements, celebrity product endorsements and personalcommentaries. Some argue that it will also require the cultivation ofnew norms and virtues of online civic-mindedness, without which online‘democracies’ will continue to be subject to theself-destructive and irrational tyrannies of mob behavior (Ess2010).

3.5 Social Networking Services and Cybercrime

SNS are hosts for a broad spectrum of ‘cybercrimes’ andrelated direct harms, including but not limited to:cyberbullying/cyberharassment, cyberstalking, child exploitation,cyberextortion, cyberfraud, illegal surveillance, identity theft,intellectual property/copyright violations, cyberespionage,cybersabotage and cyberterrorism. Each of these forms of criminal orantisocial behavior has a history that well pre-dates Web 2.0standards, and philosophers have tended to leave the specificcorrelations between cybercrime and SNS as an empirical matter forsocial scientists, law enforcement and Internet security firms toinvestigate. Nevertheless, cybercrime is an enduring topic ofphilosophical interest for the broader field of computer ethics, andthe migration to and evolution of such crime on SNS platforms raisesnew and distinctive ethical issues.

Among those of great ethical importance is the question of how SNSproviders ought to respond to government demands for user data forinvestigative or counterterrorism purposes. SNS providers are caughtbetween the public interest in crime prevention and their need topreserve the trust and loyalty of their users, many of whom viewgovernments as overreaching in their attempts to secure records ofonline activity. Many companies have opted to favor user security byemploying end-to-end encryption of SNS exchanges, much to the chagrinof government agencies who insist upon ‘backdoor’ accessto user data in the interests of public safety and nationalsecurity.

A related feature of SNS abuse and cybercrime is the associatedskyrocketing need for content moderation at scale by these platforms.Because automated tools for content moderation remain crude and easilygamed, social media platforms rely on large human workforces workingfor low wages, who must manually screen countless images of horrificviolence and abuse, often suffering grave and lasting psychologicalharm as a result (Roberts 2019). It is unclear how such harms to thecontent moderating workforce can be morally justified, even if theyhelp to prevent the spread of such harm to others. The arrangement hasuncomfortable echoes of Ursula LeGuin’sThe Ones Who WalkAway From Omelas; so should platform users be the ones walkingaway? Or do platforms have an ethical duty to find a morallypermissible solution, even if it endangers their business model?

Another emerging ethical concern is the increasingly politicalcharacter of cyberharassment and cyberstalking. In the U.S., women whospoke out about the lack of diversity in the tech and videogameindustries were early targets during online controversies such as2014’s ‘Gamergate’ (Salter 2017), during which somevictims were forced to cancel speaking appearances or leave theirhomes due to physical threats after their addresses and other personalinfo were posted on social media (a practice known as‘doxing’ or ‘doxxing’). More recently,journalists have been doxed and subjected to violent threats,sometimes following accusations that their reportingitselfconstituted doxing (Wilson 2018).

Doxing presents complex ethical challenges (Douglas 2016). For victimsof doxing and associated cyberthreats, traditional law enforcementbodies offer scant protection, as these agencies are oftenill-equipped to police the blurry boundary between online and physicalharms. But moreover, it’s not always clear what distinguishesimmoral doxing from justified social opprobrium. If someone records awoman spitting racial epithets in a passerby’s face, or a mandenying a disabled person service in a restaurant, and the victim oran observer posts the video online in a manner that allows theperpetrator to be identified by others in their social network, isthat unethical shaming or just deserts? What’s the differencebetween posting someone’s home address, allowing them and theirfamily to be terrorized by a mob, and posting someone’sworkplace so that their employer can consider their conduct? Casessuch as these get adjudicated byad hoc social media juriesweekly. Sometimes legal consequences do follow, as in the case of thenotorious Amy Cooper, who in 2020 was charged with filing a falsepolice report after being filmed by a Black man who she falselyaccused of threatening her in Central Park. Are doxing and other modesof social media shaming legitimate tools of justice? Or are theyindications of the dangers of unregulated moral policing? And if theanswer is ‘both,’ or ‘it depends,’ then whatare the key moral distinctions that allow us to respond appropriatelyto this new practice?

4. Social Networking Services and Metaethical Issues

A host of metaethical questions are raised by the rapid emergence ofSNS. For example, SNS lend new data to an earlier philosophical debate(Tavani 2005; Moor 2008) about whether classical ethical traditionssuch as utilitarianism, Kantian ethics or virtue ethics possesssufficient resources for illuminating the implications of emerginginformation technology for moral values, or whether we require a new ethical framework to handle suchphenomena. Charles Ess (2006, 2021) has suggested that a new,pluralistic “global information ethics” may be theappropriate context from which to view novel information technologies.Other scholars have suggested that technologies such as SNS inviterenewed attention to existing ethical approaches such aspragmatism (van den Eede 2010),virtue ethics (Vallor 2016)feminist or care ethics (Hamington 2010; Puotinen 2011) that have often been neglected byapplied ethicists in favor of conventional utilitarian anddeontological resources.

A related metaethical project relevant to SNS is the development of anexplicitlyintercultural information ethics (Ess 2005a;Capurro 2008; Honglaradom and Britz 2010). SNS and other emerginginformation technologies do not reliably confine themselves tonational or cultural boundaries, and this creates a particularchallenge for applied ethicists. For example, SNS practices indifferent countries must be analyzed against a conceptual backgroundthat recognizes and accommodates complex differences in moral normsand practices (Capurro 2005; Hongladarom 2007, Wong 2013). SNSphenomena that one might expect to benefit from intercultural analysisinclude: varied cultural patterns and preference/tolerance foraffective display, argument and debate, personal exposure, expressionsof political, interfamilial or cultural criticism, religiousexpression and sharing of intellectual property. Alternatively, thevery possibility of a coherent information ethics may come underchallenge, for example, from aconstructivist view that emerging socio-technological practices like SNS continuallyredefine ethical norms—such that our analyses of SNSand related technologies are not only doomed to operate from shiftingground, but from ground that is being shiftedby the intendedobject of our ethical analysis.

Finally, there are pressing practical concerns about whether and howphilosophers can actually have an impact on the ethical profile ofemerging technologies such as SNS. If philosophers direct theirethical analyses only to other philosophers, then such analyses mayfunction simply as ethical postmortems of human-technology relations,with no opportunity to actually pre-empt, reform or redirect unethicaltechnological practices. But to whom else can, or should, theseethical concerns be directed: SNS users? Regulatory bodies andpolitical institutions? SNS software developers? How can thetheoretical content and practical import of these analyses be madeaccessible to these varied audiences? What motivating force are theylikely to have?

These questions have become particularly acute of late with thecontroversy over alleged corporate capture by technology companies ofthe language of ethics, and associated charges of‘ethics-washing’ (Green 2021 [Other Internet Resources],Bietti 2020). Some argue that ethics is the wrong tool to fight theharms of emerging technologies and large technology platforms (Hao2021); yet alternative proposals to focus on justice, rights, harms,equity or the legitimate use of power unwittingly fall right backwithin the normative scope of ethics. Unless we resort to a cynicalframe of ‘might makes right,’ there is no escaping theneed to use ethics to distinguish the relationships withsociotechnical phenomena and powers that we regard as permissible,good, or right, from those that should be resisted and dismantled.

The profound urgency of this task becomes apparent once we recognizethat unlike those ‘life or death’ ethical dilemmas withwhich many applied ethicists are understandably often preoccupied(e.g., abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment), emerginginformation technologies such as SNS have in a very short time workedthemselves into the daily moral fabric of virtually all of our lives,transforming the social landscapeand the moral habits andpractices with which we navigate it. The ethical concerns illuminatedhere are, in a very real sense, anything but ‘academic,’and neither philosophers nor the broader human community can affordthe luxury of treating them as such.

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• Green, B., 2021, “The Contestation of Tech Ethics: A Sociotechnical Approach to Ethics and Technology in Action,” manuscript available atarXiv.org.
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