Nature: Comment, Unethical work must be filtered out or flagged

Andy · Aug 5, 2019

In 2014, an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS) described an experiment investigating whether human emotional states can be transferred to others by “emotional contagion”1. Researchers altered the news feeds of almost 700,000 Facebook users to investigate whether the percentage of positive or negative posts they view affects the tone of those they write. According to Facebook, all users consent to this kind of manipulation when they agree to the company’s terms of service.

Following widespread debate about the ethics of this research2–4, PNASissued an editorial expression of concern, noting that the collection of data “may have involved practices that were not fully consistent with the principles of obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out”5. Facebook issued an apologetic post6.

That social-media data raise challenges that conventional research-ethics frameworks might not be fit for is an area of ongoing debate7. Even so, it is concerning to us that, when we read 120 of the more than 1,500 publications citing the PNAS article (according to Google Scholar), we found that only 11 mentioned ethical concerns.

Data-collection protocols routinely go through several rounds of ethical scrutiny — by funders, reviewers and journal editors. But if ethically questionable work makes it through these procedures and is published, no formal safeguards are in place to ensure that such research is handled appropriately.

We think that this needs to change.
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www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02378-x

rvallee · Aug 5, 2019

Waves around pointing at things that have been pointed at for decades

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Nature: Comment, Unethical work must be filtered out or flagged

Andy Committee Member

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Nature: Comment, Unethical work must be filtered out or flagged

Andy Committee Member

rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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