Did you know that 59% of female escorts feel it is acceptable behavior to ‘friend’ a client on a social network?
Me neither.
It’s a completely made up statistic.
And yet it could very well be true if a new ‘study’ calling into question the ethics of active social networkers is to be trusted. According to the study by the Ethics Resource Center (ERC), “Social networkers have more ethics problems at work.” But dig into the findings and you’ll notice it’s hardly a product of in-depth research. Hell, the two categories of respondents aren’t even distinguished beyond ‘active social networkers’ and ‘other U.S. workers’. For all we know most of the people being interviewed were female escorts.
C’mon, Ethics Resource Center.
The argument for why this study is bogus is summed up pretty well in the comments section by a user names Caligulous:
Please do more research before writing articles like this.
Yes, the data shows a correlation between lax ethics and Social Networking, but Social Networking participation is an irrelevant article of data.
In this case, it’s the implication of the data that is significant. Young people. Young people make up the vast majority of those who frequent Social Networks.
Young people are also significantly less likely to be settled into permanent employment, making that article of information both obvious and irrelevant as well.
Young people also have a vastly different understanding of the ethical weight of software, and virtual information as a result of the culture surrounding them, so this correlation would ALSO be obvious, and in all likelihood, irrelevant to their use of Social Networking.
I feel no motivation to refute every notion you put forth, but I hope the implication is obvious.
Delete this article, and try again. Perhaps, this time, you can examine the data, and make up some observations that make more sense. Like how an overuse of Social Networking can leave many users jaded to the consequences of their words in real social situations, making them far more prone to incite verbal conflict in the workplace.
This post isn’t going to be a rant about the ethics of social media users. It’s a challenge to think about what’s presented as fact and judge a ‘study’ on its merits. This report seems to be lacking them.
Your thoughts?