The past, present, and future of social media marketing ethics

Abstract As social media increasingly permeates everyday life, ethical concerns about its use are coming into sharper focus. At the same time, the ethical issues involved in social media marketing have received somewhat limited attention from marketing research and practice. Therefore, many scholars are calling out for a better understanding of the role of ethics in social media marketing decisions. Current marketing ethics theories do not sufficiently consider the unique dynamics of social media. To aid researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, we propose a theoretical framework to address issues in social media marketing ethics built on theories of normative and descriptive ethics. This framework considers the normative and descriptive ethics within firm-internal and firm-external factors in the fields of law, regulation and norms, platform conditions, and stakeholder value. Then, applying a thematically built systematic literature review, we identify and discuss five distinct themes of research in social media marketing ethics: (I) advertising and customer–brand relationships; (II) the dark side of social media; (III) privacy; (IV) fake news; and (V) emerging research. These themes and their implications are discussed using the proposed theoretical framework. Our study provides a comprehensive overview and synthesis of ethical challenges in social media marketing and suggests possible research avenues for the future. In doing so, it outlines pressing issues that require attention from researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to ensure an ethically sustainable approach to social media marketing.