Case Study - Social Media Competition
A social media service is hosting a weeklong competition, awarding a limited number of prizes to participating users. To participate a user must post an amusing image, video, or story that matches a specific theme to the competition page. At the end of the week the software used to administer the competition anonymizes all posts, then forwards each to a human judge to evaluate and score. Once scored the software ranks each user’s post. Posts with the same scores are put in groups and are further ranked first in lexical order based on their last name (earlier names are ranked higher, for example a user with a last name of Doe would rank higher than a user with a last name of Smith), then by the timestamp of their application (the earlier application ranked higher than the later application and so on). The software then starts from the top of the ranked listing, automatically awarding prizes to each user from top down until all prizes have been awarded. Consider the possible ethical implications or dilemmas and answer the questions below.

Anonymizing posts (removing identifying data etc.) before forwarding to the human judge supports which of the following ACM Ethical Principles? Choose the ACM Ethical Principle which BEST applies.

• 1.1 Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing.
• 1.3 Be honest and trustworthy.
• 1.4 Be fair and take action not to discriminate.
• 1.5 Respect the work required to produce new ideas, inventions, creative works, and computing artifacts.
• Does not support any principle