Abstract
This paper proposes three principles for the ethical design of online social environments aiming to minimise the unintended harms caused by users while interacting online, specifically by enhancing the users’ awareness of the moral load of their interactions. Such principles would need to account for the strong mediation of the digital environment and the particular nature of user interactions: disembodied, asynchronous, and ambiguous intent about the target audience. I argue that, by contrast to face to face interactions, additional factors make it more difficult for users to exercise moral sensitivity in an online environment. An ethics for social media user interactions is ultimately an ethics of human relations mediated by a particular environment; hence I look towards an enactive inspired ethics in formulating principles for human interactions online to enhance or at least do not hinder a user’s moral sensitivity. This enactive take on social media ethics supplements classical moral frameworks by asking us to focus on the relations established through the interactions and the environment created by those interactions.
Highlights
January 2020, a Tweet went viral claiming that a second impeachment procedure of -president in office Trump would lead to him losing all the post-presidential benefits
Considering how interactions appear on social media as disembodied, asynchronous, and mediated, an enactive framework provides a useful vocabulary to characterise what happens in user interactions when misunderstandings occur
The third principle addresses what we owe to the digital online environment that we find on social media
Summary
January 2020, a Tweet went viral claiming that a second impeachment procedure of -president in office Trump would lead to him losing all the post-presidential benefits. There are some other harms challenging to categorise as major or minor: manipulation of others via truncating information or sharing misinformation, hateful speech disguised as inspirational (such as fit-spiration, which may be shaming specific body shapes), passive-aggressive speech, reporting innocent users to get them banned for expressing divergent opinions, trolling, etc. These harms are not exclusive to the online realm. Enactive Principles for the Ethics of User Interactions on Social Media: How to Overcome
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