How do we balance the tremendous potential for the use of social media in negotiation with the ethical concerns that can arise from such use? Let’s start with the standards that held in the pre-internet world and see if they provide sufficient guidance in the rapidly changing social media environment.

 

Most (but not all) negotiation practitioners in prior years would avoid tactics like lying, attempting to exert improper influence, manipulation and coercion. Irrespective of whether such tactics contradict the instigator’s personal values and standards, they tend to undermine the trust that underlies creating value in a negotiation and facilitating agreement in the first place. Such trust is necessary to share enough about the parties’ interest to engage in honest and creative problem solving, whether one is in the midst of a one-time transaction or in a series of discussions. Further, if and when disclosed, these approaches often backfire and preclude any kind of meaningful agreement, let alone one that is sustainable.

 

At a minimum, such ethical criteria should apply in the new world of social media, but the multitude of avenues and approaches to the use of social media may tend to blur the boundaries between what is ethical and what is not. This complicates the question of which negotiation-related actions are best avoided simply because they may backfire or cause reputational damage, or because they violate a deeper sense of morality. In the latter case, such tactics should not be used even if there is little or no risk of adverse consequences or of “getting caught.”

 

A minimal approach would be to follow the law, but that probably does not suffice for such a rapidly evolving sphere as social media. When it comes to negotiating in the midst of a digital revolution, regulations simply have not kept pace with the rapidly expanding set of tactics, data sources and potential for malfeasance and harm from the misuse of social media. Even where governments have tried (e.g., the European Union’s General Data Privacy Regulation), their limited legal frameworks around known issues like privacy cannot provide a comprehensive guide for adapting to new situations and evaluating potential tactics online.

 

While not a legal standard by any means, let’s consider what we might call the “creepy” factor of privacy intrusions. People often do not realize how much information they provide by using digital outlets, whether shopping services or conversational outlets. When they see that data being transmogrified into a dossier of their personal lives, relationships, and habits, they can be dismayed and put off–even where this is perfectly legal. When such “intrusive data mining” is revealed in the course of a negotiation, it can quickly undermine the potential for trust. In the pre-internet era, we would not have countenanced dredging through someone’s trash barrels or stealing their files to learn of their preferences. Would we now feel comfortable dredging through their digital detritus?

 

Legal concerns also do not address we might refer to as ‘instrumental’ ethical boundaries. Many firms that have explored opportunities to exert influence or shape discourse online found such efforts backfiring after being exposed to public or media scrutiny. It is worth noting that the damage to the offending firm was often greater than to the victim firm. In short, ethical considerations aside, foul play online may not pay in many instances.

 

As technology advances, more and more methods will become available to businesses, activists and nefarious or opportunistic actors of all stripes, it will become increasingly inevitable that negotiators face difficult ethical decisions that require more careful consideration beyond instrumental factors alone. Surely, we can all agree on several minimal standards about information gleaned through social media: