Individuals participating in online communities can remain anonymous and create fictitious personas. The ethical concern of this anonymity is that it

Key Points

• People are using online communities but they have concerns about information credibility through word of mouth on these platforms.
• Social media is becoming increasingly influential in shaping individuals’ decision-making as more and better quality information about products is made available.
• The unethical use of social media has resulted in the breach of individual privacy and impacts both physical and information security.
• Confidentiality and anonymity are ethical practices designed to protect the privacy of human subjects while collecting, analyzing, and reporting data.
• Providing anonymity of information collected from research participants means that either the project does not collect identifying information of individual persons (e.g., name, address, email address, etc.), or the project cannot link individual responses with participants' identities.
• Confidentiality refers to separating or modifying any personal, identifying information provided by participants from the data.

Thus, Individuals participating in online communities can remain anonymous and create fictitious personas. The ethical concern of this anonymity is that it facilitates engagement in unethical behavior.