‘The Apomediated World: The Ethical Challenges of Using Social Media in Health Research’

STEPS Seminar with Daniel O’Connor, PhD, Head of Humanities and Social Science at the Wellcome Trust

STEPS Seminar: Dan O’Connor – The ethical challenges of using social media in health research by Stepscentre on Mixcloud

Social media such as blogs, wikis, discussion forums, ratings sites and online social networks like Facebook and Twitter, are completely changing the ways in which lay people and health professionals create, share and understand health information. We can now find, discuss and even review diagnoses, symptoms and treatments with pretty much anyone, anywhere in the world, almost instantly. The transformation from just a decade ago is astounding. This seminar will explore the ethical challenges that this transformation raises for health research in particular.

Drawing on examples of emerging uses of social media in health research (including patient-led research, crowdsourcing and social recruitment practices) Dr Dan O’Connor, Head of Humanities and Social Science at the Wellcome Trust, will argue that existing research ethics frameworks, concerned as they are with vertical power differentials, may be inadequate to deal with those ethical challenges. In their place he proposes an ‘ethics of apomediation’ in which the moral concerns of power differentials are replaced with those of a horizontal peer-to-peer system.