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.

What ethical principle could possibly be violated by the competition software ranking scored posts by last name, then by timestamp, instead of by timestamp then last name? 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.
• 1.6 Respect privacy.
• 1.7 Honor confidentiality.
• The scenario presents no ethical dilemmas.