This could be an opportunity to educate your IRB on social media research, as not all IRBs understand the implications of what they ask researchers to do (I speak from personal experience here). As others have stated, anonymization of Twitter data is both difficult logistically and can impede analysis and presentation of results. At the same time, even with such a public platform, these concerns must be balanced against users' rights and interests. But there are ways other than anonymization to accomplish this. In our recent report on the Black Lives Matter movement's use of social media, we took three steps to address the privacy and intellectual property concerns of the users whose tweets we cited as examples: * Posting links to tweets rather than reproducing their full text. * Linking only to tweets that had collected a minimum of 100 retweets. * Linking only to tweets posted by users who had at least 3,000 followers or were Twitter-verified. We feel these steps helped achieve a balance between our interests as researchers, the audience's interest in understanding the phenomenon, and participants' interests in not having their content appropriated inappropriately. You can read more about these steps on p. 86 of the report, which is available here: http://cmsimpact.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/beyond_the_hashtags_2016.pdf /DEEN On 4/13/2017 11:11 PM, Ye Na Lee wrote:
Dear subscribers to Association of Internet Researchers, I am currently going through IRB process for a research on Twitter data and I was told to anonymize Twitter handles completely. Are there any online programs with which I could anonymize usernames? I don`t think I should create fake Twitter handles for every single tweet that I quote on my paper. I`d really appreciate any suggestions on anonymizing Twitter handles! Thank you in advance! _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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-- Deen Freelon, Ph.D. Associate Professor School of Communication, American University Office: McKinley 325 freelon@american.edu | http://dfreelon.org | @dfreelon <https://twitter.com/dfreelon> New report: Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice <http://www.cmsimpact.org/blmreport>