Is it a social media peep show?

Researchers may be studying your postings, raising ethical questions.

Have you tweeted, posted an Instagram photo or just generally engaged in social media before? Then it’s possible you’ve been part of a research experiment of sorts. Think that raises some ethical questions? You’re not the only one.

University of Colorado Boulder associate professor Casey Fiesler is among a group of researchers from six institutions who received a $3 million National Science Foundation grant to explore the ethics of social media research in the hopes of creating a guideline for others to follow.

A grant of this size is rare, signaling a win for both ethics enthusiasts and the school’s Department of Information Science, which is in its third year, Fiesler said.

“This is particularly exciting because it’s one of the first grants we’ve gotten within the department and it also means I’ll be able to hire and get more Ph.D. students to grow our program,” she said.

Fiesler herself is receiving a $400,000 chunk that she will put toward two focus areas: How people react to social media and whether a researcher should follow a website’s terms of service when scraping public data. To do this, she’ll be conducting interviews and surveys, as well as analyzing comments under articles and large data sets.

Researchers at universities are required to go through an ethical review process when interacting with humans, Fiesler said. But that’s not always the case if a researcher is only working with data and if people are not publicly identifiable.

“I would argue that even if you’re not working with people, if you’re working with data that was created by people, you should at least be thoughtful with how you’re using that data,” she said.

It’s common for researchers to pull from Twitter, Instagram and Reddit for their work, she said. Not even dating apps are immune. A simple search for “Twitter data” on Google Scholar turns up 4.6 million results, although she admitted that not all those results may actually include Twitter data.

A lot of the times this is good, serving up a massive amount of information about human behavior for researchers to analyze, she said. For example, public health research done on Twitter can predict flu trends as well as the CDC.

“It’s just like sitting on a park bench and watching everyone around you interact,” she said. “It’s just people out there in public.”

But people don’t always realize how public their social media is

and often underestimate their audience, she said.

And sometimes studies have a loud public backlash. Earlier this week, a study where researchers used facial recognition technology to predict people’s sexuality was met with outrage from LGBT groups. Other headline-making incidents occurred when Facebook manipulated users’ news feeds to study users’ moods and when a researcher published 70,000 OkCupid usernames, sexual turn-ons, orientation and more.

The Facebook incident kicked off many discussions about research ethics within the social computing research community, she said. Fiesler wants to know why people get upset. Sticking with the Facebook example, was it because they didn’t know they were being monitored? Or because their newsfeeds were being manipulated? Was it something else?

It’s up to Fiesler to find out.