When Online Research Can Do Harm

While research ethics are a core component to all social research, digital ethnography poses an additional set of unique challenges that must be addressed while researching vulnerable populations, but still advice for digital ethnographers[1] in terms of the ethical dilemmas of researching and marketing to vulnerable populations online is scarce. The aim here is not to create ethical protocols or standard prescriptive as to how digital ethnographers should practice ethnography online, but to discuss some ethical considerations and challenges associated with researching vulnerable populations, in hope to sensitize social researchers to the potential issues digital ethnography poses.