Mentions of Ethics Codes in Social Media: A Twitter Analysis

Abstract

Ethics codes and ethical guidelines are an established way of installing standards in professions, science, technology, and business. They help institutions and organizations address emerging issues, regulate practice-specific contexts, provide support, and are seen as helpful resources for professional-specific teaching. When it comes to the broader role of ethics codes in society and to the question of how ethics codes are seen and perceived outside professional contexts, the picture is much less clear, however. In order to find out about the broader societal role of ethics codes-related topics, we analyzed mentions of ethics codes on the social media site Twitter between June 2016 and May 2017. This chapter will detail the results of the study, which examined the frequency, content, and role of tweets that contain the search phrases “ethics code,” “code of ethics,” “professional code,” and their plural versions. We used the Twitter streaming application programming interface (API) and STACK to retrieve the tweets. It turned out that by far, the most often used term is “code of ethics,” with an overall frequency of around 83,000. Topics discussed in the tweets centered around ethical issues in political journalism, politics, media, and sports. While we had assumed we would find an ongoing illuminating conversation between professionals from all kinds of fields that would give us some hints on the current role of ethics codes in an evolving technology-relying society; instead, we found a much more diverse conglomerate of stakeholders partly using ethics codes-related tweets to promulgate their views strategically.