Principles for the production and dissemination of recruitment material for three clinical trials of an online intervention

Some health research studies recruit participants through electronic mechanisms such as the placement of messages on social media platforms. This raises questions for ethics committee oversight, since effective social media campaigns might involve the production and dissemination of hundreds of contemporaneous messages. For the Narrative Experiences Online (NEON) study, we have developed nine principles to control the production and dissemination of promotional material. These have been approved by an ethics committee and enable the audit of our recruitment work. We propose that the drafting for approval of recruitment principles by health research studies may, in many cases, strike an appropriate balance between enabling ethical oversight of online recruitment work and the potential burden of message review. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13063-021-05412-4.