Dear Becky, My understanding, though I haven't been involved in Twitter research myself, is that academics in the US have mostly decided it is fine to include screennames and that academics in the UK have mostly decided it is not OK to include screennames. I think that Twitter ToS require the sceennames to be included and allow publication as long as the full tweet is published (including sceenname). However, publishing without the sceenname is not permitted (this is second hand information so I may be wrong). The other issue is that even if sceennames are not included then it is easy to find the author from the content of the tweet and so the authors are still trivially deanonymised. Minor tweaks to punctuation/wording are apparently also insufficient as Twitter's search function will still normally find the original tweet. Depending on the research method you are using it may be possible to write your own synthesised example tweets that are representative of the kind of things people say. However, I know that for some methods/fields that is not possible. I think it is a question where you will want your Research Ethics Board/IRB to sign off on your answer. Helena Webb <helena.webb@cs.ox.ac.uk> from the University of Oxford might be a good person to talk to about this because she uses a similar Twitter example in her research ethics case studies at the workshops she runs. She did research that she was not able to publish because she ran into this problem and was not able to find a solution that protected the tweeters and was publishable. Daniel On 13/07/18 07:23, Hayes, Rebecca M wrote:
Dear All, Can you please weigh in on the decision to include or not include screennames when we cite tweets in a book? The book is on new media and crime, and we are using tweets in a few places as examples of some different discussions.
We are back and forth on whether we should include the screennames and at others or disclude them. The arguments we have seen thus far, are to include them because it was made public and we are citing someones words. The other argument is to disclude them as the person did not consent to have it printed in that way persay, and the screenname attached in our book could be used to find and harass the person. What are your thoughts?
Thank you, Becky _______________________________________________ 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/