A Review on the Ethical Issues of Online Social Networking

Social Networking has become a global phenomenon (Nielsen, 2012) with people around the world finding ways to connect with people of different culture, getting involved with events and having to trade goods. It has been a fundamental part of the lives of people who are connected on the Internet. For most individuals,social networking sites have been a principal source of connecting to people whom they have established relationship with or to people who are interesting enough for them to establish a relationship with. With the massive applications being used today and with the future applications envisioned, online social networks have several ethical issues attached to their development which have been nagging some scholars. Majority of the users are not aware of the dangers of the existing online social networks as they joined these sites. This paper therefore will discuss these ethical issues based on historical facts and future applications ethical impacts to the society. The study suggests that because the Internet is Politically Neutral (Steele and Stein, 2002), we have to protect ourselves in terms of our personal and professional affiliations and so we have to constantly evaluate all our actions on our social networking accounts to avoid the ethical dangers.