However, there are significant concerns related to the sharing of information and photographs through social networking, which has led to a number of ethical dilemmas. Foremost, the personal information and photographs hosted on these social media platforms are vulnerable to hacks and breaches, which have led to the unauthorised release of user data to malicious actors. In April 2020, Facebook admitted that the phone numbers of 533 million users had been leaked (Beiji & Liu, 2020). Incidents such as these represent the potential for social media platforms to unwittingly disclose valuable personal information to hackers, which could use such details for malicious intent.
Furthermore, the information and photographs hosted on social media occasionally includes objectionable and immoral content, such as those related to child pornography, terrorist activities and drug abuse. Social media networks have struggled to keep up with the wide variety of objectionable information and photographs posted on their platforms, and have not been able to successfully censor the full range of such content (Beigi & Liu, 2020). The proliferation of such content on social media platforms is problematic as it represents the spread of criminal activity on these platforms, and could cause significant distress to the victims of such activities. The information and photographs of individual users can also be used by conmen to target platform users in a variety of inventive scams.
Social media platforms have also been found to have abused personal user information and photographs for commercial gain. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that Facebook had provided unfettered access of the personal information of over 87 million users to the third party data firm Cambridge Analytica, which could have been then leaked to foreign governments to use as part of a disinformation campaign in the 2020 U.S. elections. Furthermore, social media information is regularly collected and used as part of cookie-based marketing activities, which represent a breach of user privacy that social media network users may not have consented to (Di Minin et al, 2021).
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