Hi Lior, Are you planning on publishing individual tweets verbatim? You mentioned discourse analysis and of course giving some examples of the data is helpful for the reader. However, I’d imagine by having a discussion in your methods section about the hashtag you are working with and stating the reasons why you withdraw from re-purposing those tweets and re-publishing them in another platform, you may still run your analysis. I work with Instagram photos of children and make sure I include photos with no face in my text. With visual narratives, that’s possible because, thankfully, body posture recognition is not yet on the book. Of course, you cannot blur any words in a tweet or any verbal narrative. I may be wrong to say this but quoting tweets verbatim is problematic not only for minors but for ALL people. What do everyone think? Ayşenur --------------------------------------------------- Ayşenur Benevento Ph.D. Candidate in Developmental Psychology The Graduate Center, City University of New York Research Associate with Children’s Environment Research Group<http://cergnyc.org/> www.aysenurataman.com<http://www.aysenurataman.com> On Dec 18, 2017, at 5:48 AM, Stuart Shulman <stuart.shulman@gmail.com<mailto:stuart.shulman@gmail.com>> wrote: The central issue is the absence of any verifiable age data on Twitter. With the exception of "verified" accounts, where the verified user has a known public birthdate listed somewhere other than Twitter, there is no age data. Any account could be underage. No doubt there are minors "passing" for adults and the opposite as well. So, how would we know? You could go by the Twitter user description, which is a self-assigned brief biography that sometimes includes social demographic information (ex., high school athlete, states ones age directly, the photograph, etc.) but none of that is verified. You could cross-check user by user against other public information. For example, my son is @liamcs10 on Twitter. He is 15. If you Google his name you can verify he is a minor because he plays on a U17 soccer club and his current roster picture is online. At the level of the ethnographic research, you could do this time-consuming forensic work, but it would only work in some cases, not all, and would never scale up to the type of research many are doing with Twitter data. So you have a problem. If you need to assure an IRB or other research supervisory board there are no children in your Twitter data: it cannot really be done. Stu Stu Shulman <https://twitter.com/StuartWShulman>MA Olympic Development Program (ODP), Assistant Coach Region I ODP, 2005 Boys ID Camp Staff Coach NEFC-West 2008 Boys, Head Coach On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 5:07 AM, Cormac O'Keeffe <okeeffe.cormac@gmail.com<mailto:okeeffe.cormac@gmail.com>> wrote: That's a really good pint Sonia. Thanks! On Mon, 18 Dec 2017 at 10:59, Charles M. Ess <c.m.ess@media.uio.no<mailto:c.m.ess@media.uio.no>> wrote: perfect - thanks for the most helpful clarification, Sonia! - c. On 18/12/17 10:35, Livingstone,S wrote: Children cannot legally consent to use of their personal data, precisely because they are children. Hence in the US COPPA applies, and in Europe the General Data Protection Regulation., both of which require verifiable parental consent for the use of children's personal data. Much depends on the legal definition of personal data, of course. I would also urge a child-rights approach to research ethics. For instance, contrary to what many researchers believe, and contrary to companies' T&C, in my research children have told me that they consider Facebook to be public and Twitter to be privacy (cf Nissenbaum's contextual integrity). So my understanding is that this is incorrect below, and that much social media research is improper.... Best, Sonia -----Original Message----- From: Air-L [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Charles M. Ess Sent: 18 December 2017 08:58 To: Lior Beserman <liorbeserman@gmail.com<mailto:liorbeserman@gmail.com>>; air-l@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Ethical problem in a Twitter reaserch Hi, one fairly standard approach is to go ahead and conduct your research - though probably with the additional step of setting up a second database that assigns random identifiers to the original accounts / profiles. Once you have completed your analyses - then the question becomes what you need to include as explicit quotes in the publication / dissemination phase. Typically, these are only a few - i.e., in contrast with 10s if not 100s of thousands (if not more) of texts gathered in. Whereas informed consent is impossible for the latter - it is considerably more feasible for the former. So one possibility is to contact the writers you want to quote and ask for their permission. Of course, this will not directly address the question as to whether they are minors - and you're exactly right that this is a critical ethical (and, in many jurisdictions, a legal) issue. At this point, some will argue that this is not your problem - the informants have read (well, at least clicked through) the ToS and that such posts are by a kind of default public and so don't require anything more than acknowledgement (copyright to the author). If a minor is involved, on this view, ethical obligations to vulnerable populations are overridden by a kind of legal coverage ostensibly provided by their agreeing to the ToS. Others - especially from deontological and ethics of care perspectives - will argue that protection of minors overrides any legal contract established in the ToS. How you directly ascertain the identity of someone on Twitter while asking for their permission to use their quote is, of course, not unproblematic. But these days, it's harder to be a dog unnoticed as a dog on the Internet and so it might be more straightforward than say 10 or certainly 20 years ago. My 2 cents - good luck and looking forward to the discussion! - charles On 18/12/17 07:46, Lior Beserman wrote: Dear Air-L Community, I have encountered an ethical problem which I am sure I am not the first to encounter and so would appreciate your say on the matter. I am doing a discourse analysis on a twitter hashtag and I have no way to discern that I am not using under age (under 18) users tweets. As there are completely different questions and guidelines to research minors from an ethical perspective, I was wondering how other people have dealt with this problem in their research? Thank you, Lior Beserman Navon, Ph.D. Candidate The Department of Sociology & Anthropology The Hebrew University of Jerusalem _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org<mailto: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 Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ -- Professor in Media Studies Department of Media and Communication University of Oslo <http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html> Postboks 1093 Blindern 0317 Oslo, Norway c.m.ess@media.uio.no<mailto:c.m.ess@media.uio.no> _______________________________________________ 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 Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ -- Professor in Media Studies Department of Media and Communication University of Oslo <http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html> Postboks 1093 Blindern 0317 Oslo, Norway c.m.ess@media.uio.no<mailto:c.m.ess@media.uio.no> _______________________________________________ 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 Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ -- Mobile:+33 7 68 59 39 17 Twitter: ocaoimh Skype: c.ocaoimh <okeeffe.cormac@gmail.com<mailto:okeeffe.cormac@gmail.com>> _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org<mailto: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<http://air-l-aoir.org> Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org<mailto: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 Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/