Hi all, very interesting and relevant discussion. I just want to point out that while the following does indeed faithfully represent the letter of Twitter's TOS, it is nigh-impossible to implement technically on one's own. On 2/27/2019 8:17 PM, Stuart Shulman wrote:
Every single spreadsheet (or other non-compliant collection) of Tweets without a live connection to Twitter (to confirm the Tweet is not yet deleted) violates the Twitter ToS and the basic notion of the "right to be forgotten" as articulated through European public policy when a researcher looks at the deleted content.
This being the case, it is no exaggeration to say that the vast majority of published Twitter research probably violates this part of the TOS. Certainly all aggregate studies of Twitter data that haven't purged deleted tweets by the time of publication do. (And what about tweets deleted post-publication?) Unenforceable clauses like this are part of why I have recommended that traditional human subjects concerns, rather than TOS designed for corporate clients, guide researchers' use of social media data. See https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/56f4q and https://medium.com/on-archivy/twitters-developer-policies-for-researchers-ar... All that said, I'd say publishing screenshots of social media content without consent is bad practice in all but the most public of cases. Notice how that differs from following the above TOS provisions to the letter: the ethical standards I apply to these kinds of cases are the same as are commonly used for private communications between researchers and research participants. Best, /DEEN -- Deen Freelon, Ph.D. Associate Professor School of Media and Journalism, UNC-Chapel Hill http://dfreelon.org | @dfreelon <https://twitter.com/dfreelon> | https://github.com/dfreelon