The Ethics of Online Reputation and Social Network Use
This paper examines the ethical dimensions of social network use in three professional contexts: evaluating job candidates based on their online profiles, monitoring existing employees through social media, and the sale of user data by platforms such as Facebook to advertisers and professional services firms. The paper argues that judging candidates solely on social media content removes important context and perpetuates double standards. It contends that covert employee monitoring constitutes a violation of trust, and that the commercial exploitation of personal data — particularly for insurance risk profiling — raises serious ethical concerns even when legally permissible under platforms' own terms of service.
- Introduction: Social Networks as Professional Tools: Commercial growth of social networks raises ethical stakes
- Evaluating Job Candidates on Social Networks: Judging candidates by profiles lacks context and fairness
- Monitoring Employees on Social Networks: Covert employee monitoring violates trust and privacy
- Advertising and Data Sales by Professional Services Firms: Facebook data sales enable ethically questionable profiling
- Conclusion: Social networks blur public and private boundaries
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper organizes a broad ethical topic into three clearly defined, distinct contexts — hiring, monitoring, and data sales — giving each argument focused treatment rather than blending them together.
- The author balances acknowledgment of real-world realities (e.g., extreme social media content does exist) with a principled defense of nuance and context, which strengthens the credibility of the argument.
- The opening statistic ($6B in advertising spend, up 72%) immediately establishes the commercial stakes and frames the ethical discussion within an economic reality.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses a structured ethical analysis framework, addressing each scenario by separating what is legally permissible from what is morally defensible. This distinction — notably applied to Facebook's data ownership claims — is a useful technique for applied ethics writing, allowing the author to concede a legal point while still maintaining an ethical objection.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a framing introduction that identifies the three issues to be addressed. It then devotes one section each to candidate screening, employee monitoring, and commercial data use, before ending with a brief conclusion. Each body section follows a pattern of describing the practice, acknowledging its real-world prevalence, and then rendering an ethical judgment. Two supporting citations anchor the factual claims throughout.
Introduction: Social Networks as Professional Tools
The use of social networks as a means to screen potential employees — in addition to monitoring existing employees' lifestyles — has emerged as a common practice in many companies globally. The fact that advertisers spent $6 billion advertising on social networks in 2011, up 72% from 2010, reveals the trajectory of these platforms: they are designed, at least in part, for selling profile information to the highest bidder (Hof, 2011). This paper examines three aspects of the ethics of social network use: screening job candidates, monitoring employees, and the legality and morality of using social network data for sales prospecting by industries such as insurance and law.
References
Hof, R. (2011, July). Advertisers flock to social networks. Technology Review, 114(4), 67.
McKenzie, P. (2011). Weapons of mass assignment. Communications of the ACM, 54(5), 54.
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