[Air-l] Great Ethical disasters in Internet Research? (Dr Chris Mann)

[T.R.Jordan at open.ac.uk]

Interesting question results from this, when is flawed methodology also
flawed ethics? And vice versa. My two examples are Internet statistics and
the Rimm study.

1. The stats one is in Michael Wolffs (1998) Burn Rate: how I survived the
gold rush years on the Internet, New York: Touchstone, p.130 when he recalls
simply making up statistics about the Internet under the pressure of
internet-hype.
2. Rimm study. There's no doubt (to me at least) there is deeply flawed
methodology in this report. Or that the research of it has some links to
anti-porn campaigners who were then targetting censoring legislation against
the Internet. There's a conspiracy theory (which may be true) about this
report that it was created in order to touch of a moral panic in order to
get censoring legislation pushed through in the USA. My memory is there's
lots of circumstantial evidence that points this way but I'm not certain a
'smoking gun' or complete proof was found. See Mike Godwin's Cyberrights,
Times Books 1998, for this story.