Ethical norms and issues in crowdsourcing practices: A Habermasian analysis

By Daniel Schlagwein, Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic, Benjamin Hanckel. 2018

61 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Crowdsourcing practices have generated much discussion on their ethics and fairness, yet these topics have received little scholarly investigation. Some have criticized crowdsourcing for worker exploitation and for undermining workplace regulations. Others have lauded crowdsourcing for enabling workers' autonomy and allowing disadvantaged people to access previously unreachable job markets. In this paper, we examine the ethics in crowdsourcing practices by focusing on three questions: (a) What ethical issues exist in crowdsourcing practices? (b) are ethical norms emerging or are issues emerging that require ethical norms? and, more generally, (c) how can the ethics of crowdsourcing practices be established? We answer these questions by engaging with Jürgen Habermas' discourse ethics theory to interpret findings from a longitudinal field study (from 2013 to 2016) involving key crowdsourcing participants (workers, platform organizers, and requesters) of three crowdsourcing communities. Grounded in this empirical study, we identify ethical concerns and discuss the ones for which ethical norms have emerged as well as others which remain unresolved and problematic in crowdsourcing practices. Furthermore, we provide normative considerations of how ethical concerns can be identified, discussed, and resolved based on the principles of discourse ethics.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Safety Research, AI Ethics, Fairness & Society, Social Sciences & Humanities

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Science Applications

1. Vinodkumar Prabhakaran
2. Razvan Amironesei
3. Mark Díaz
4. Emily L. Denton

In Safety Research

1. Vinodkumar Prabhakaran
2. Razvan Amironesei
3. Emily L. Denton

In AI Ethics, Fairness & Society

1. Vinodkumar Prabhakaran
2. Mark Díaz
3. Razvan Amironesei
4. Emily L. Denton

In Social Sciences & Humanities

1. Razvan Amironesei
2. Vinodkumar Prabhakaran
3. Emily L. Denton

Citations in the corpus

• CrowdWorkSheets: Accounting for Individual and Collective Identities Underlying Crowdsourced Dataset Annotation (2022, background): “In addition, Schlagwein et al. [49] conducted extensive fieldwork, engaging crowdworkers, platform organizers, and requesters over the course of three years to uncover a range of ethical dilemmas relating to gig economy crowd-sourcing.”