Social media is pervasive (anyone else staying glued to social media during the coronavirus pandemic, while at the same time wishing they could stop looking at social media so much?), and its utility and application in human subject research should be considered, according to the authors of a recent editorial in JCO Cancer Clinical Informatics. The editorial touches on the impacts, good or bad, that social media can have on research. The article raises some interesting points. While the UAMS IRB (and other IRBs) routinely reviews proposed recruitment ads intended for social media, we have no oversight over any posts by study subjects or other interested parties intended as recruitment. (In fact, an acquaintance of ours has been posting on social media recruitment information for a COVID-19-related study recently, using language that probably wouldn’t make it through our IRB, such as describing a test article as “very safe.” Nor is a subject “code of conduct” a concept we’ve given a lot of thought to, or, we’re guessing, we’d be overly amenable to, given the IRB’s emphasis on subjects’ rights, including the right to make their own decisions about their actions and speech. Then again, like so many things in IRB-land, “it depends,” in this case, on what the code of conduct would entail, and where we are in our thinking when we first consider one. (Is a consent form basically a code of conduct in a different format?)
We’d like to thank Dr. Kristin Zorn in the Cancer Institute for bringing this article to our attention.