30 October 2025
Author: Lakshmi Balachandran Nair
Abstract:
This case study examines data collection and related ethical considerations in the context of social media communities.We are living in a digitalized world. The different domains of social life are increasingly getting reorganized around digital communication and social media infrastructures (Brennen & Kreiss, 2016). Especially since the commencement of COVID-19 pandemic, the use of social media and other online platforms has increased exponentially across the world (Wheeler, 2020). Social media can be defined as online spaces in which social interactions amongst people are enabled (Leppänen et al., 2013). People using social media connect and communicate with others daily through collaborative generation, exchange, and continuous modification of content (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; McKenna et al., 2017).
At this point, it is important to note that these social media platforms are ‘social’ in different ways (Baym, 2011). To give an example, Facebook users mostly connect with people in their friend circles. This online platform affords multimodal data in the form of texts, photos, and videos shared by users for the perusal of other users who are familiar and friendly with them (Mikhaeil and Baskerville, 2019). Reddit, on the other hand, is a social news aggregation and discussion website. Reddit data is mostly textual. Although ascertaining strict boundaries between different types of social media platforms is difficult due to their fuzzy nature, in general Facebook is a site in which people connect with personal acquaintances (by adding them as “Facebook friends”) and like-minded individuals (by joining Facebook groups of shared interests). Prior research has classified such social media platforms into five types – blogs (e.g.: My Plastic Free Life), social networking sites (e.g.: Facebook), collaborative projects (e.g.: Wikipedia), content communities (e.g.: YouTube), and virtual worlds (e.g.: Second Life).These classifications, however, are not completely exclusive. Some social media platforms might fit into more than one classification. For example, Yahoo! Answers is a social networking site as well as a collaborative project (Agichtein et al., 2018; Nair, 2020). The omnipresence of these social media platforms in our everyday life has created several new opportunities for qualitative management and organizational researchers (Blank, 2017). The large quantity of easily searchable, low-cost digital data available online offers unique opportunities to researchers who explore the activities and interactions of people (Hewson, 2013).
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