Ethnographic research on digital intimate platforms: a feminist look at ethical and methodological challenges

Ethical and methodological challenges are common in ethnographic research on digital intimate platforms, with which we identify digital platforms designed and used for intimate, sexual, and romantic interactions and encounters. Referring to the eight principles of data feminism for conducting justice-oriented research with digital data of data feminism, with particular attention to the affective experience of research, we explore some of the ethical and methodological challenges encountered in conducting digital ethnography on OnlyFans and mobile dating apps and propose strategies to confront them. Findings revolve around three key issues: 1) Users’ privacy: tensions between conducting ethical ethnographic research and respecting users’ privacy; 2) Researcher’s privacy: Doing research on platforms that require identifiers, like facial pictures and/or identity verification creates a tension between protecting researcher’s privacy and conducting research; 3) Researcher-user interaction : digital platforms for intimacy are characterized by implicit norms of interaction and relational expectations, and the researcher’s presence is interpreted accordingly; researchers experienced unwanted sexualised interactions, ghosting and blocking, and fatigue connected to information overload. Overall, the article shows how studying intimate digital spaces raises ethical and methodological challenges and proposes that feminist digital ethnography entails: (i) making labor visible, (ii) reporting the embodied experience of research, (iii) centering users’ consent, privacy, and self-determination, and (iv) striving for diversity in the research team.