Ethical Standards: The Belmont Report Scandal

The Belmont Report was published in the Federal Register in 1979. It is a document written by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which formed as a result to the Tuskegee Experiment scandal and serves to shape bioethics policy in the United States. This report outlines the ethical standards that research involving human subjects is required to follow.

Vindu Goel is a technology reporter for The Times and has recently written about various social media companies. In 2014, he authored “Facebook Tinkers with Users’ Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry,” which describes how Facebook manipulated half of a million users’ newsfeeds to test if increased positive or negative posts

affected their emotions.
“The Trials of Alice Goffman” was published in 2016 in The Times by Gideon Lewis-Kraus- a writer of reportage and criticism. He discusses the backlash that sociologist Alice Goffman received from her controversial book, On the Run, and how Goffman dealt with the criticism. Goffman spent more than six years in a largely African American neighborhood in Philadelphia taking field notes, primarily on how crime affects individuals in this community.
The Belmont Report is split into three sections: Boundaries Between Practice & Research, Basic Ethical Principles, and Applications.

The first sections provide a background for what the later sections will discuss as this section makes the distinction between ‘practice’ and ‘research.’ However, these two terms can occur simultaneously, but if the smallest amount of research is present, the activity is required to be reviewed for the protection of its human subjects. Basic Ethical Principles states that there are three fundamental principles for ethical research involving human subjects: respect for persons, beneficence-maximizing benefits and minimizing harm, and justice-fairness of distribution. These principles are applied in the last section which is also broken down into three parts. The first of which states that informed consent is needed; this ensures that participants agreed to participate and that they are presented all the information clearly before the experiment or after-only if the results could be affected. The second section accounts for potential harms and analyzes if the research is worth the risks. The final section requires the process of selecting subjects to be socially fair and

just.
Issues that relate to the Belmont Report have arose from the research of Facebook and Alice Goffman as addressed in the articles previously mentioned. In response to the outcry, Facebook stated that all its users agree to this manipulation in the terms of service. However, Facebook never explicitly specified that this type of research was occurring; thus, they may have had consent, but not informed consent. Furthermore, increased negative posts on news feeds could have harmed some users’ mental health, especially for those who have prior problems. In Goffman’s situation consent was also an issue. Some argue that because she was in the field for over six years, her subjects confided in her as a friend not a researcher; therefore, her work is seen as betrayal of close friends by outing their secrets. Yet, Goffman did burn all of her field notes and use pseudonyms to protect the identities of those in her book. Additionally, Lewis-Kraus notes how Goffman splits her royalty checks with the central characters of On the Run. Through application of the Belmont Report to the criticism received by Facebook and Alice Goffman for their research, it is easy to see how fine the line of ethical research can be.