Social media have been transforming how individuals, communities and organizations create, share and consume information (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011). Many studies highlight the “bright side of social media” (e.g. Kumar, Bezawada, Rishika, Janakiraman, & Kannan, 2016; Sabate, Berbegal-Mirabent, Cañabate, & Lebherz, 2014; Wagner, 2017), for example how social media democratize engagement between firms and consumers or how firms can improve public relations, customer service, product development or personnel decision making. Many of these business activities are almost not imaginable anymore without some sort of social media involvement.
Regardless of the numerous opportunities that social media offer, there is undoubtedly a “dark side” to social media that holds enormous risks for individuals, communities, organizations and even whole societies. More and more attention is paid to concerns such as cyberbullying (O’Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011), trolling (Buckels, Trapnell, & Paulhus, 2014; Hardaker, 2010), privacy (Pai & Arnott, 2013), fake news (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; European Commission, 2018) or addictive use (Blackwell, Leaman, Tramposch, Osborne, & Liss, 2017). Therefore, despite the many benefits, social media’s significant negative or detrimental consequences are worthy of research attention. Further theoretical as well as empirical work is needed to better understand this dark side of social media. Thus, the aim of this “Management Focus” section is to improve understanding of the so far largely neglected dark side of social media by encouraging researchers from a variety of fields to share their work.
The dark side of social media has implications for individuals, communities, organizations and many aspects of society, thus submissions are not limited to specific stakeholder groups or themes. Nevertheless, potential topics and underlying research questions anticipated for this “Management Focus” section may include but are not limited to:
- Theories, models and classification frameworks that shed light on the dark side of social media.
- Methods for studying the dark side of social media and its impact on individuals, communities and organizations, and on many aspects of society.
- Understanding how individuals, communities and organizations can minimize, prevent or respond to the dark side of social media.
- Understanding what motivates individuals, communities and organizations to deliberately engage in dark side behaviors and practices.
- Examining dark side outcomes, behaviors and practices that accidently or unintentionally emerge.
- The ethics of the dark sides of the socialandthe media (especially with recent AI developments and uses on social networks).
- Approaches to lobbying, regulating and controlling dark side behaviors and practices.
- Region, sector and industry-focused studies on the dark side of social media.
- Specific social media phenomena, including but not limited to hashtag hijacks, reputation blackmail, online firestorms, tweet-up disasters, activities on the darknet/dark web/deep web.