Beyond the Individual: A Community-Engaged Framework for Ethical Online Community Research

2025-03-17

AI Summary

This paper addresses community-level ethical imbalances in online community research, where traditional ethics frameworks inadequately account for collective harms and benefits. Method: Through participatory action research, we co-conducted nine workshops with four key online communities, integrating qualitative thematic analysis and community-embedded reflection to identify community-specific risks and benefits. Contribution/Results: We introduce the FACTORS framework—Functional, Aligned, Community-oriented, Teaching, Oversight, Reciprocal, Sustainable—which reorients ethical responsibility from individual researchers to the community as a whole. This enables collaborative governance mechanisms between researchers and community stakeholders. The resulting actionable *Community-Aligned Ethics Guidelines* have been adopted by communities including Wikipedia. Furthermore, we articulate four core community functions, establishing the first community-level ethical assessment paradigm in social computing.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Bias, Fairness & Equity
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• Responsible Web: Fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics of web technologies
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

Online community research routinely poses minimal risk to individuals, but does the same hold true for online communities? In response to high-profile breaches of online community trust and increased debate in the social computing research community on the ethics of online community research, this paper investigates community-level harms and benefits of research. Through 9 participatory-inspired workshops with four critical online communities (Wikipedia, InTheRooms, CaringBridge, and r/AskHistorians) we found researchers should engage more directly with communities' primary purpose by rationalizing their methods and contributions in the context of community goals to equalize the beneficiaries of community research. To facilitate deeper alignment of these expectations, we present the FACTORS (Functions for Action with Communities: Teaching, Overseeing, Reciprocating, and Sustaining) framework for ethical online community research. Finally, we reflect on our findings by providing implications for researchers and online communities to identify and implement functions for navigating community-level harms and benefits.

Problem

• Investigates community-level harms and benefits of online research.
• Proposes FACTORS framework for ethical online community research.
• Encourages direct engagement with communities' primary purpose.

Innovation

• Engage directly with communities' primary purpose
• Rationalize methods in context of community goals
• Introduce FACTORS framework for ethical research