Including screennames with tweets
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
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
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I just recently published a book on Twitter, race, and gender, and my publisher was very insistent I did use people's Twitter handles. For clarification, I used all publicly available tweets. I went back and forth on it myself a few times (and still every once in a while wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "did I do the right thing?!"), but ended up agreeing with them. Their argument, per Twitter's ToS, was that people's tweets should be treated as you would an in-text citation (e.g., "Hayes said"), as they are their thoughts and ideas, expressed in a public forum, and thus they have earned the right to be credited for them (almost on a par with copyright). Because I used public tweets anyone could and can still find the tweets even if I hadn't listed the screen name, which renders the argument that we need to protect their identity somewhat moot. In my book, I discuss some pretty awful statements though, and I did make sure to not choose tweets as examples that could really get people into trouble with their employer, for instance, and would instead use more innocuous tweets to illustrate my point. This kind of research, because I use public tweets, falls outside of our IRB's scope, as they consider it public information on a par with analyzing media content and thus non-human-subjects research. I don't know if this helps at all - I think it's a tough issue to deal with, and both decisions, like you said, have their pros and cons. On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:27 AM Daniel Thomas < daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
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
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_______________________________________________ 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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-- Judith E. Rosenbaum, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Communication and Journalism University of Maine 414 Dunn Hall Orono, ME 04469 www.juditherosenbaum.com/ @JudithRBaum
Hi all, Casey Fiesler and I recently published an article on Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366). One of our findings from the study was that when we asked, "How would you feel if a Tweet of yours was used in a research study and your Tweet was quoted in a published research paper, attributed to your Twitter handle?" only about ~24% of respondents indicated that they would be comfortable with this. There's obviously a lot of situations in which including Twitter handles is appropriate (quoting public figures seems like a pretty clear cut case), but I do think it might be worth taking user expectations into consideration in that contextual decision, particularly if you are working with populations subject to harassment/bullying. Cheers, Nick ________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Judith Rosenbaum-Andre <judith.rosenbaumandre@maine.edu> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:45:06 AM To: daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets I just recently published a book on Twitter, race, and gender, and my publisher was very insistent I did use people's Twitter handles. For clarification, I used all publicly available tweets. I went back and forth on it myself a few times (and still every once in a while wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "did I do the right thing?!"), but ended up agreeing with them. Their argument, per Twitter's ToS, was that people's tweets should be treated as you would an in-text citation (e.g., "Hayes said"), as they are their thoughts and ideas, expressed in a public forum, and thus they have earned the right to be credited for them (almost on a par with copyright). Because I used public tweets anyone could and can still find the tweets even if I hadn't listed the screen name, which renders the argument that we need to protect their identity somewhat moot. In my book, I discuss some pretty awful statements though, and I did make sure to not choose tweets as examples that could really get people into trouble with their employer, for instance, and would instead use more innocuous tweets to illustrate my point. This kind of research, because I use public tweets, falls outside of our IRB's scope, as they consider it public information on a par with analyzing media content and thus non-human-subjects research. I don't know if this helps at all - I think it's a tough issue to deal with, and both decisions, like you said, have their pros and cons. On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:27 AM Daniel Thomas < daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
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 https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Faoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232548876&sdata=HMh%2BFHkdWDwYlDJYLKOqngqLHFdyVdgHBF8JMuO1w5I%3D&reserved=0 Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.aoir.org%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Fair-l-aoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232548876&sdata=h3LjEtUNDWWctqEjXv4m8jqET0juN0eyXDcHDAX7GJk%3D&reserved=0
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-- Judith E. Rosenbaum, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Communication and Journalism University of Maine 414 Dunn Hall Orono, ME 04469 https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=www.juditherosenbaum.com%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=2kw65MmcKlu5C61oSqIdQxH7E1Jw0Z0qWYERWLhM4IU%3D&reserved=0 @JudithRBaum _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Faoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=O5fdUR88%2BN84HGFN7YMzcIzYnWaEdtaFqmI1SA8fcvI%3D&reserved=0 Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.aoir.org%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Fair-l-aoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=lAvZL%2Fcshbz8PzqtmolrwXtQd0HPzcKAe6qrs4IQXkk%3D&reserved=0 Join the Association of Internet Researchers: https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aoir.org%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=i49yZe8HhgP7InUdJwGQOObj0DYrsH5oPWYmkIlXKUs%3D&reserved=0
Out of curiosity, I scanned through Twitter's ToS and related policies; I didn't see anything indicating how they want a tweet to be cited. Maybe it did in earlier versions, or I just missed it. But even so, it's not clear how Twitter's ToS has any standing or relevance to what a researcher does, as they're not the person contracting with Twitter in that contract. We could take their advice in to account, but I think Nick and Casey's point is the right one. What's the added value to the research of including the person's Twitter handle in the publication, such that it overcomes the possible discomfort and possible harm it could bring? It's surprising to me how often adding the handle / the name of the speaker / the interviewee really doesn't add to the analysis -- that we may be doing it more because it's what journalists do, or because we want to perform that it’s a legit tweet, or out of habit. Our instinct should not be how much can I publish based on what rights I think people have given up, but how far can I go to protect people and still make the cogent analysis the discussion requires. Tarleton On 7/13/18, 11:17 AM, "Air-L on behalf of Proferes, Nicholas" <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org on behalf of nproferes@uky.edu> wrote: Hi all, Casey Fiesler and I recently published an article on Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366). One of our findings from the study was that when we asked, "How would you feel if a Tweet of yours was used in a research study and your Tweet was quoted in a published research paper, attributed to your Twitter handle?" only about ~24% of respondents indicated that they would be comfortable with this. There's obviously a lot of situations in which including Twitter handles is appropriate (quoting public figures seems like a pretty clear cut case), but I do think it might be worth taking user expectations into consideration in that contextual decision, particularly if you are working with populations subject to harassment/bullying. Cheers, Nick ________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Judith Rosenbaum-Andre <judith.rosenbaumandre@maine.edu> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:45:06 AM To: daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets I just recently published a book on Twitter, race, and gender, and my publisher was very insistent I did use people's Twitter handles. For clarification, I used all publicly available tweets. I went back and forth on it myself a few times (and still every once in a while wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "did I do the right thing?!"), but ended up agreeing with them. Their argument, per Twitter's ToS, was that people's tweets should be treated as you would an in-text citation (e.g., "Hayes said"), as they are their thoughts and ideas, expressed in a public forum, and thus they have earned the right to be credited for them (almost on a par with copyright). Because I used public tweets anyone could and can still find the tweets even if I hadn't listed the screen name, which renders the argument that we need to protect their identity somewhat moot. In my book, I discuss some pretty awful statements though, and I did make sure to not choose tweets as examples that could really get people into trouble with their employer, for instance, and would instead use more innocuous tweets to illustrate my point. This kind of research, because I use public tweets, falls outside of our IRB's scope, as they consider it public information on a par with analyzing media content and thus non-human-subjects research. I don't know if this helps at all - I think it's a tough issue to deal with, and both decisions, like you said, have their pros and cons. On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:27 AM Daniel Thomas < daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote: > 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 https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Faoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232548876&sdata=HMh%2BFHkdWDwYlDJYLKOqngqLHFdyVdgHBF8JMuO1w5I%3D&reserved=0 > > Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: > https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.aoir.org%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Fair-l-aoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232548876&sdata=h3LjEtUNDWWctqEjXv4m8jqET0juN0eyXDcHDAX7GJk%3D&reserved=0 > > > > Join the Association of Internet Researchers: > > https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aoir.org%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232548876&sdata=bwNC%2FhiWey%2FF45XKHmM%2Bos06UdLh8vQFyXYtIpb2%2Bzw%3D&reserved=0 > > > _______________________________________________ > The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list > is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Faoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=O5fdUR88%2BN84HGFN7YMzcIzYnWaEdtaFqmI1SA8fcvI%3D&reserved=0 > Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: > https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.aoir.org%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Fair-l-aoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=lAvZL%2Fcshbz8PzqtmolrwXtQd0HPzcKAe6qrs4IQXkk%3D&reserved=0 > > Join the Association of Internet Researchers: > https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aoir.org%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=i49yZe8HhgP7InUdJwGQOObj0DYrsH5oPWYmkIlXKUs%3D&reserved=0 > -- Judith E. Rosenbaum, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Communication and Journalism University of Maine 414 Dunn Hall Orono, ME 04469 https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=www.juditherosenbaum.com%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=2kw65MmcKlu5C61oSqIdQxH7E1Jw0Z0qWYERWLhM4IU%3D&reserved=0 @JudithRBaum _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Faoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=O5fdUR88%2BN84HGFN7YMzcIzYnWaEdtaFqmI1SA8fcvI%3D&reserved=0 Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.aoir.org%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Fair-l-aoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=lAvZL%2Fcshbz8PzqtmolrwXtQd0HPzcKAe6qrs4IQXkk%3D&reserved=0 Join the Association of Internet Researchers: https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aoir.org%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=i49yZe8HhgP7InUdJwGQOObj0DYrsH5oPWYmkIlXKUs%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ 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/
Nick already mentioned out recent research about this, but I’ll just chime in and add a few thoughts: It hasn’t come up at all what the subject matter of the papers/books are. I think that this is really relevant to an ethical analysis of this situation, because it goes to potential harm. There’s a big difference between “here is a tweet from someone talking about what they had for breakfast” and “here is a tweet from someone showing signs of a mental illness” or “here is a tweet from a political dissident who might be in physical danger”. Whether or not online content is PUBLIC is an important contextual factor (because of course if it’s not public, that’s a problem), but in my opinion should not be the only thing relevant for this decision. Though it’s also worth pointing out that if the tweet is something that could actually lead to harm, the issue isn’t publishing the handle or not - because public tweets can be easily searched. In that case, it might be better not to quote a tweet verbatim, or to use composites. As Tarleton says, the issue is whether a certain use is required to describe the work, which goes to a cost/benefit analysis. If it’s a tweet about breakfast that should be a different analysis than a tweet about a health condition. For the latter, you might want a more compelling reason for why the tweet needs to be there. The account name issue is even more tricky because depending on the context, it is possible there could be harm by not giving someone CREDIT for their content. But unless that kind of thing is likely - given what Nick and I found, unless there’s a reason that a handle has explanatory value it seems to just add another layer of potential discomfort for the unknowing research participants. That said, there are different norms in different communities about this kind of thing. What I’d like most to see is ethical analyses beyond “is it public or not” and for those analyses to be surfaced in the writing. So regardless of decisions, explaining them as part of methods would be great! Casey
On Jul 13, 2018, at 9:27 AM, Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu> wrote:
Out of curiosity, I scanned through Twitter's ToS and related policies; I didn't see anything indicating how they want a tweet to be cited. Maybe it did in earlier versions, or I just missed it. But even so, it's not clear how Twitter's ToS has any standing or relevance to what a researcher does, as they're not the person contracting with Twitter in that contract. We could take their advice in to account, but I think Nick and Casey's point is the right one. What's the added value to the research of including the person's Twitter handle in the publication, such that it overcomes the possible discomfort and possible harm it could bring? It's surprising to me how often adding the handle / the name of the speaker / the interviewee really doesn't add to the analysis -- that we may be doing it more because it's what journalists do, or because we want to perform that it’s a legit tweet, or out of habit. Our instinct should not be how much can I publish based on what rights I think people have given up, but how far can I go to protect people and still make the cogent analysis the discussion requires.
Tarleton
On 7/13/18, 11:17 AM, "Air-L on behalf of Proferes, Nicholas" <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org on behalf of nproferes@uky.edu> wrote:
Hi all,
Casey Fiesler and I recently published an article on Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366).
One of our findings from the study was that when we asked, "How would you feel if a Tweet of yours was used in a research study and your Tweet was quoted in a published research paper, attributed to your Twitter handle?" only about ~24% of respondents indicated that they would be comfortable with this.
There's obviously a lot of situations in which including Twitter handles is appropriate (quoting public figures seems like a pretty clear cut case), but I do think it might be worth taking user expectations into consideration in that contextual decision, particularly if you are working with populations subject to harassment/bullying.
Cheers,
Nick
________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Judith Rosenbaum-Andre <judith.rosenbaumandre@maine.edu> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:45:06 AM To: daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
I just recently published a book on Twitter, race, and gender, and my publisher was very insistent I did use people's Twitter handles. For clarification, I used all publicly available tweets. I went back and forth on it myself a few times (and still every once in a while wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "did I do the right thing?!"), but ended up agreeing with them. Their argument, per Twitter's ToS, was that people's tweets should be treated as you would an in-text citation (e.g., "Hayes said"), as they are their thoughts and ideas, expressed in a public forum, and thus they have earned the right to be credited for them (almost on a par with copyright). Because I used public tweets anyone could and can still find the tweets even if I hadn't listed the screen name, which renders the argument that we need to protect their identity somewhat moot. In my book, I discuss some pretty awful statements though, and I did make sure to not choose tweets as examples that could really get people into trouble with their employer, for instance, and would instead use more innocuous tweets to illustrate my point. This kind of research, because I use public tweets, falls outside of our IRB's scope, as they consider it public information on a par with analyzing media content and thus non-human-subjects research. I don't know if this helps at all - I think it's a tough issue to deal with, and both decisions, like you said, have their pros and cons.
On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:27 AM Daniel Thomas < daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
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 https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Faoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232548876&sdata=HMh%2BFHkdWDwYlDJYLKOqngqLHFdyVdgHBF8JMuO1w5I%3D&reserved=0 Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.aoir.org%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Fair-l-aoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232548876&sdata=h3LjEtUNDWWctqEjXv4m8jqET0juN0eyXDcHDAX7GJk%3D&reserved=0
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-- Judith E. Rosenbaum, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Communication and Journalism University of Maine 414 Dunn Hall Orono, ME 04469
https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=www.juditherosenbaum.com%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=2kw65MmcKlu5C61oSqIdQxH7E1Jw0Z0qWYERWLhM4IU%3D&reserved=0 @JudithRBaum _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Faoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=O5fdUR88%2BN84HGFN7YMzcIzYnWaEdtaFqmI1SA8fcvI%3D&reserved=0 Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.aoir.org%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Fair-l-aoir.org&data=02%7C01%7Cnproferes%40uky.edu%7C80b9cf66e88449f8de5008d5e8adbb9d%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636670755232558886&sdata=lAvZL%2Fcshbz8PzqtmolrwXtQd0HPzcKAe6qrs4IQXkk%3D&reserved=0
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Hi all, I agree with those suggesting that context is important, and that the consideration should be what harm may be caused. In terms of potential solutions for anonymity, in some recent work (in press) I took the decision to anonymise the content of tweets by changing each quoted tweet in one of the following two ways: by either swapping words or phrases in a linked clause, or by substituting a word for a close synonym. This hopefully retained the content and emotional weight while preventing a simple search for the tweet. This is in a case study of conflict between members of a particular online community, and a commercial organisation. By contrast, in a different context where the quoted tweet was a neutral statement related to an experience had by the user in their daily life, I contacted them to ask permission to quote verbatim with their username (and was granted it). Naomi Dr Naomi Jacobs Research Fellow TrustLens Project Department of Computing Science University of Aberdeen +44 (0)1224 274564 -----Original Message----- From: Air-L [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Casey Lynn Fiesler Sent: 13 July 2018 17:08 To: Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu> Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets Nick already mentioned out recent research about this, but I’ll just chime in and add a few thoughts: It hasn’t come up at all what the subject matter of the papers/books are. I think that this is really relevant to an ethical analysis of this situation, because it goes to potential harm. There’s a big difference between “here is a tweet from someone talking about what they had for breakfast” and “here is a tweet from someone showing signs of a mental illness” or “here is a tweet from a political dissident who might be in physical danger”. Whether or not online content is PUBLIC is an important contextual factor (because of course if it’s not public, that’s a problem), but in my opinion should not be the only thing relevant for this decision. Though it’s also worth pointing out that if the tweet is something that could actually lead to harm, the issue isn’t publishing the handle or not - because public tweets can be easily searched. In that case, it might be better not to quote a tweet verbatim, or to use composites. As Tarleton says, the issue is whether a certain use is required to describe the work, which goes to a cost/benefit analysis. If it’s a tweet about breakfast that should be a different analysis than a tweet about a health condition. For the latter, you might want a more compelling reason for why the tweet needs to be there. The account name issue is even more tricky because depending on the context, it is possible there could be harm by not giving someone CREDIT for their content. But unless that kind of thing is likely - given what Nick and I found, unless there’s a reason that a handle has explanatory value it seems to just add another layer of potential discomfort for the unknowing research participants. That said, there are different norms in different communities about this kind of thing. What I’d like most to see is ethical analyses beyond “is it public or not” and for those analyses to be surfaced in the writing. So regardless of decisions, explaining them as part of methods would be great! Casey
On Jul 13, 2018, at 9:27 AM, Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu> wrote:
Out of curiosity, I scanned through Twitter's ToS and related policies; I didn't see anything indicating how they want a tweet to be cited. Maybe it did in earlier versions, or I just missed it. But even so, it's not clear how Twitter's ToS has any standing or relevance to what a researcher does, as they're not the person contracting with Twitter in that contract. We could take their advice in to account, but I think Nick and Casey's point is the right one. What's the added value to the research of including the person's Twitter handle in the publication, such that it overcomes the possible discomfort and possible harm it could bring? It's surprising to me how often adding the handle / the name of the speaker / the interviewee really doesn't add to the analysis -- that we may be doing it more because it's what journalists do, or because we want to perform that it’s a legit tweet, or out of habit. Our instinct should not be how much can I publish based on what rights I think people have given up, but how far can I go to protect people and still make the cogent analysis the discussion requires.
Tarleton
On 7/13/18, 11:17 AM, "Air-L on behalf of Proferes, Nicholas" <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org on behalf of nproferes@uky.edu> wrote:
Hi all,
Casey Fiesler and I recently published an article on Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366).
One of our findings from the study was that when we asked, "How would you feel if a Tweet of yours was used in a research study and your Tweet was quoted in a published research paper, attributed to your Twitter handle?" only about ~24% of respondents indicated that they would be comfortable with this.
There's obviously a lot of situations in which including Twitter handles is appropriate (quoting public figures seems like a pretty clear cut case), but I do think it might be worth taking user expectations into consideration in that contextual decision, particularly if you are working with populations subject to harassment/bullying.
Cheers,
Nick
________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Judith Rosenbaum-Andre <judith.rosenbaumandre@maine.edu> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:45:06 AM To: daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
I just recently published a book on Twitter, race, and gender, and my publisher was very insistent I did use people's Twitter handles. For clarification, I used all publicly available tweets. I went back and forth on it myself a few times (and still every once in a while wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "did I do the right thing?!"), but ended up agreeing with them. Their argument, per Twitter's ToS, was that people's tweets should be treated as you would an in-text citation (e.g., "Hayes said"), as they are their thoughts and ideas, expressed in a public forum, and thus they have earned the right to be credited for them (almost on a par with copyright). Because I used public tweets anyone could and can still find the tweets even if I hadn't listed the screen name, which renders the argument that we need to protect their identity somewhat moot. In my book, I discuss some pretty awful statements though, and I did make sure to not choose tweets as examples that could really get people into trouble with their employer, for instance, and would instead use more innocuous tweets to illustrate my point. This kind of research, because I use public tweets, falls outside of our IRB's scope, as they consider it public information on a par with analyzing media content and thus non-human-subjects research. I don't know if this helps at all - I think it's a tough issue to deal with, and both decisions, like you said, have their pros and cons.
On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:27 AM Daniel Thomas < daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
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?
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I really appreciate this discussion. It has helped me think through a lot. At first I had deleted all names. But I want to clarify that I am using tweets as examples in my book, for discussions of particular hashtags. In all there are 12 tweets. All of them are demonstrating an example, and in a positive light. After these discussions we chose to delete the one example that was critical. My main concern after all of this discussion and why I think I should include the names (in this case), is because who am I to not cite other peoples work? It airs on plagirism if I do not. And as academic I think we often fall into a paternalistic mindset thinking we know better than people about what they want or what they know. This is a public forum and we have to expect and respect that they know that, and in my case none of the public tweets I am using are presenting the users in negative ways (that I know of). This was such a hard decision to make! Again thank you. This has been a very helpful discussion and I think that context matters in every one of these decisions. Best, Becky ________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Jacobs, Naomi <naomi.jacobs@abdn.ac.uk> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:28:43 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets Hi all, I agree with those suggesting that context is important, and that the consideration should be what harm may be caused. In terms of potential solutions for anonymity, in some recent work (in press) I took the decision to anonymise the content of tweets by changing each quoted tweet in one of the following two ways: by either swapping words or phrases in a linked clause, or by substituting a word for a close synonym. This hopefully retained the content and emotional weight while preventing a simple search for the tweet. This is in a case study of conflict between members of a particular online community, and a commercial organisation. By contrast, in a different context where the quoted tweet was a neutral statement related to an experience had by the user in their daily life, I contacted them to ask permission to quote verbatim with their username (and was granted it). Naomi Dr Naomi Jacobs Research Fellow TrustLens Project Department of Computing Science University of Aberdeen +44 (0)1224 274564 -----Original Message----- From: Air-L [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Casey Lynn Fiesler Sent: 13 July 2018 17:08 To: Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu> Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets Nick already mentioned out recent research about this, but I’ll just chime in and add a few thoughts: It hasn’t come up at all what the subject matter of the papers/books are. I think that this is really relevant to an ethical analysis of this situation, because it goes to potential harm. There’s a big difference between “here is a tweet from someone talking about what they had for breakfast” and “here is a tweet from someone showing signs of a mental illness” or “here is a tweet from a political dissident who might be in physical danger”. Whether or not online content is PUBLIC is an important contextual factor (because of course if it’s not public, that’s a problem), but in my opinion should not be the only thing relevant for this decision. Though it’s also worth pointing out that if the tweet is something that could actually lead to harm, the issue isn’t publishing the handle or not - because public tweets can be easily searched. In that case, it might be better not to quote a tweet verbatim, or to use composites. As Tarleton says, the issue is whether a certain use is required to describe the work, which goes to a cost/benefit analysis. If it’s a tweet about breakfast that should be a different analysis than a tweet about a health condition. For the latter, you might want a more compelling reason for why the tweet needs to be there. The account name issue is even more tricky because depending on the context, it is possible there could be harm by not giving someone CREDIT for their content. But unless that kind of thing is likely - given what Nick and I found, unless there’s a reason that a handle has explanatory value it seems to just add another layer of potential discomfort for the unknowing research participants. That said, there are different norms in different communities about this kind of thing. What I’d like most to see is ethical analyses beyond “is it public or not” and for those analyses to be surfaced in the writing. So regardless of decisions, explaining them as part of methods would be great! Casey
On Jul 13, 2018, at 9:27 AM, Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu> wrote:
Out of curiosity, I scanned through Twitter's ToS and related policies; I didn't see anything indicating how they want a tweet to be cited. Maybe it did in earlier versions, or I just missed it. But even so, it's not clear how Twitter's ToS has any standing or relevance to what a researcher does, as they're not the person contracting with Twitter in that contract. We could take their advice in to account, but I think Nick and Casey's point is the right one. What's the added value to the research of including the person's Twitter handle in the publication, such that it overcomes the possible discomfort and possible harm it could bring? It's surprising to me how often adding the handle / the name of the speaker / the interviewee really doesn't add to the analysis -- that we may be doing it more because it's what journalists do, or because we want to perform that it’s a legit tweet, or out of habit. Our instinct should not be how much can I publish based on what rights I think people have given up, but how far can I go to protect people and still make the cogent analysis the discussion requires.
Tarleton
On 7/13/18, 11:17 AM, "Air-L on behalf of Proferes, Nicholas" <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org on behalf of nproferes@uky.edu> wrote:
Hi all,
Casey Fiesler and I recently published an article on Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366).
One of our findings from the study was that when we asked, "How would you feel if a Tweet of yours was used in a research study and your Tweet was quoted in a published research paper, attributed to your Twitter handle?" only about ~24% of respondents indicated that they would be comfortable with this.
There's obviously a lot of situations in which including Twitter handles is appropriate (quoting public figures seems like a pretty clear cut case), but I do think it might be worth taking user expectations into consideration in that contextual decision, particularly if you are working with populations subject to harassment/bullying.
Cheers,
Nick
________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Judith Rosenbaum-Andre <judith.rosenbaumandre@maine.edu> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:45:06 AM To: daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
I just recently published a book on Twitter, race, and gender, and my publisher was very insistent I did use people's Twitter handles. For clarification, I used all publicly available tweets. I went back and forth on it myself a few times (and still every once in a while wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "did I do the right thing?!"), but ended up agreeing with them. Their argument, per Twitter's ToS, was that people's tweets should be treated as you would an in-text citation (e.g., "Hayes said"), as they are their thoughts and ideas, expressed in a public forum, and thus they have earned the right to be credited for them (almost on a par with copyright). Because I used public tweets anyone could and can still find the tweets even if I hadn't listed the screen name, which renders the argument that we need to protect their identity somewhat moot. In my book, I discuss some pretty awful statements though, and I did make sure to not choose tweets as examples that could really get people into trouble with their employer, for instance, and would instead use more innocuous tweets to illustrate my point. This kind of research, because I use public tweets, falls outside of our IRB's scope, as they consider it public information on a par with analyzing media content and thus non-human-subjects research. I don't know if this helps at all - I think it's a tough issue to deal with, and both decisions, like you said, have their pros and cons.
On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:27 AM Daniel Thomas < daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
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?
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Also I, of course, considered more than "it is public" but extensively whether I think it causes harm either way. Thanks Again, Becky ________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Hayes, Rebecca M <hayes2r@cmich.edu> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:43:02 PM To: Jacobs, Naomi; air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets I really appreciate this discussion. It has helped me think through a lot. At first I had deleted all names. But I want to clarify that I am using tweets as examples in my book, for discussions of particular hashtags. In all there are 12 tweets. All of them are demonstrating an example, and in a positive light. After these discussions we chose to delete the one example that was critical. My main concern after all of this discussion and why I think I should include the names (in this case), is because who am I to not cite other peoples work? It airs on plagirism if I do not. And as academic I think we often fall into a paternalistic mindset thinking we know better than people about what they want or what they know. This is a public forum and we have to expect and respect that they know that, and in my case none of the public tweets I am using are presenting the users in negative ways (that I know of). This was such a hard decision to make! Again thank you. This has been a very helpful discussion and I think that context matters in every one of these decisions. Best, Becky ________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Jacobs, Naomi <naomi.jacobs@abdn.ac.uk> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:28:43 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets Hi all, I agree with those suggesting that context is important, and that the consideration should be what harm may be caused. In terms of potential solutions for anonymity, in some recent work (in press) I took the decision to anonymise the content of tweets by changing each quoted tweet in one of the following two ways: by either swapping words or phrases in a linked clause, or by substituting a word for a close synonym. This hopefully retained the content and emotional weight while preventing a simple search for the tweet. This is in a case study of conflict between members of a particular online community, and a commercial organisation. By contrast, in a different context where the quoted tweet was a neutral statement related to an experience had by the user in their daily life, I contacted them to ask permission to quote verbatim with their username (and was granted it). Naomi Dr Naomi Jacobs Research Fellow TrustLens Project Department of Computing Science University of Aberdeen +44 (0)1224 274564 -----Original Message----- From: Air-L [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Casey Lynn Fiesler Sent: 13 July 2018 17:08 To: Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu> Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets Nick already mentioned out recent research about this, but I’ll just chime in and add a few thoughts: It hasn’t come up at all what the subject matter of the papers/books are. I think that this is really relevant to an ethical analysis of this situation, because it goes to potential harm. There’s a big difference between “here is a tweet from someone talking about what they had for breakfast” and “here is a tweet from someone showing signs of a mental illness” or “here is a tweet from a political dissident who might be in physical danger”. Whether or not online content is PUBLIC is an important contextual factor (because of course if it’s not public, that’s a problem), but in my opinion should not be the only thing relevant for this decision. Though it’s also worth pointing out that if the tweet is something that could actually lead to harm, the issue isn’t publishing the handle or not - because public tweets can be easily searched. In that case, it might be better not to quote a tweet verbatim, or to use composites. As Tarleton says, the issue is whether a certain use is required to describe the work, which goes to a cost/benefit analysis. If it’s a tweet about breakfast that should be a different analysis than a tweet about a health condition. For the latter, you might want a more compelling reason for why the tweet needs to be there. The account name issue is even more tricky because depending on the context, it is possible there could be harm by not giving someone CREDIT for their content. But unless that kind of thing is likely - given what Nick and I found, unless there’s a reason that a handle has explanatory value it seems to just add another layer of potential discomfort for the unknowing research participants. That said, there are different norms in different communities about this kind of thing. What I’d like most to see is ethical analyses beyond “is it public or not” and for those analyses to be surfaced in the writing. So regardless of decisions, explaining them as part of methods would be great! Casey
On Jul 13, 2018, at 9:27 AM, Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu> wrote:
Out of curiosity, I scanned through Twitter's ToS and related policies; I didn't see anything indicating how they want a tweet to be cited. Maybe it did in earlier versions, or I just missed it. But even so, it's not clear how Twitter's ToS has any standing or relevance to what a researcher does, as they're not the person contracting with Twitter in that contract. We could take their advice in to account, but I think Nick and Casey's point is the right one. What's the added value to the research of including the person's Twitter handle in the publication, such that it overcomes the possible discomfort and possible harm it could bring? It's surprising to me how often adding the handle / the name of the speaker / the interviewee really doesn't add to the analysis -- that we may be doing it more because it's what journalists do, or because we want to perform that it’s a legit tweet, or out of habit. Our instinct should not be how much can I publish based on what rights I think people have given up, but how far can I go to protect people and still make the cogent analysis the discussion requires.
Tarleton
On 7/13/18, 11:17 AM, "Air-L on behalf of Proferes, Nicholas" <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org on behalf of nproferes@uky.edu> wrote:
Hi all,
Casey Fiesler and I recently published an article on Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366).
One of our findings from the study was that when we asked, "How would you feel if a Tweet of yours was used in a research study and your Tweet was quoted in a published research paper, attributed to your Twitter handle?" only about ~24% of respondents indicated that they would be comfortable with this.
There's obviously a lot of situations in which including Twitter handles is appropriate (quoting public figures seems like a pretty clear cut case), but I do think it might be worth taking user expectations into consideration in that contextual decision, particularly if you are working with populations subject to harassment/bullying.
Cheers,
Nick
________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Judith Rosenbaum-Andre <judith.rosenbaumandre@maine.edu> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:45:06 AM To: daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
I just recently published a book on Twitter, race, and gender, and my publisher was very insistent I did use people's Twitter handles. For clarification, I used all publicly available tweets. I went back and forth on it myself a few times (and still every once in a while wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "did I do the right thing?!"), but ended up agreeing with them. Their argument, per Twitter's ToS, was that people's tweets should be treated as you would an in-text citation (e.g., "Hayes said"), as they are their thoughts and ideas, expressed in a public forum, and thus they have earned the right to be credited for them (almost on a par with copyright). Because I used public tweets anyone could and can still find the tweets even if I hadn't listed the screen name, which renders the argument that we need to protect their identity somewhat moot. In my book, I discuss some pretty awful statements though, and I did make sure to not choose tweets as examples that could really get people into trouble with their employer, for instance, and would instead use more innocuous tweets to illustrate my point. This kind of research, because I use public tweets, falls outside of our IRB's scope, as they consider it public information on a par with analyzing media content and thus non-human-subjects research. I don't know if this helps at all - I think it's a tough issue to deal with, and both decisions, like you said, have their pros and cons.
On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:27 AM Daniel Thomas < daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
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?
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Particularly given the kinds of concerns Rebecca has brought up, keep in mind that another option is to ask permission to publish content, or to ask whether they would like their handle included or not. If it’s a small number this might not be very arduous. You then might choose to include content if you don’t hear back from them - that you’re only checking for people who express discomfort. Here is a paper with an ethical considerations section at the end where they explain a process like this: http://jesspater.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Hunger-Hurts-but-Starving-Wo... Casey On Jul 13, 2018, at 10:52 AM, Hayes, Rebecca M <hayes2r@cmich.edu<mailto:hayes2r@cmich.edu>> wrote: Also I, of course, considered more than "it is public" but extensively whether I think it causes harm either way. Thanks Again, Becky ________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org>> on behalf of Hayes, Rebecca M <hayes2r@cmich.edu<mailto:hayes2r@cmich.edu>> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:43:02 PM To: Jacobs, Naomi; air-l@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets I really appreciate this discussion. It has helped me think through a lot. At first I had deleted all names. But I want to clarify that I am using tweets as examples in my book, for discussions of particular hashtags. In all there are 12 tweets. All of them are demonstrating an example, and in a positive light. After these discussions we chose to delete the one example that was critical. My main concern after all of this discussion and why I think I should include the names (in this case), is because who am I to not cite other peoples work? It airs on plagirism if I do not. And as academic I think we often fall into a paternalistic mindset thinking we know better than people about what they want or what they know. This is a public forum and we have to expect and respect that they know that, and in my case none of the public tweets I am using are presenting the users in negative ways (that I know of). This was such a hard decision to make! Again thank you. This has been a very helpful discussion and I think that context matters in every one of these decisions. Best, Becky ________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org>> on behalf of Jacobs, Naomi <naomi.jacobs@abdn.ac.uk<mailto:naomi.jacobs@abdn.ac.uk>> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:28:43 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets Hi all, I agree with those suggesting that context is important, and that the consideration should be what harm may be caused. In terms of potential solutions for anonymity, in some recent work (in press) I took the decision to anonymise the content of tweets by changing each quoted tweet in one of the following two ways: by either swapping words or phrases in a linked clause, or by substituting a word for a close synonym. This hopefully retained the content and emotional weight while preventing a simple search for the tweet. This is in a case study of conflict between members of a particular online community, and a commercial organisation. By contrast, in a different context where the quoted tweet was a neutral statement related to an experience had by the user in their daily life, I contacted them to ask permission to quote verbatim with their username (and was granted it). Naomi Dr Naomi Jacobs Research Fellow TrustLens Project Department of Computing Science University of Aberdeen +44 (0)1224 274564 -----Original Message----- From: Air-L [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Casey Lynn Fiesler Sent: 13 July 2018 17:08 To: Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu<mailto:tlg28@cornell.edu>> Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets Nick already mentioned out recent research about this, but I’ll just chime in and add a few thoughts: It hasn’t come up at all what the subject matter of the papers/books are. I think that this is really relevant to an ethical analysis of this situation, because it goes to potential harm. There’s a big difference between “here is a tweet from someone talking about what they had for breakfast” and “here is a tweet from someone showing signs of a mental illness” or “here is a tweet from a political dissident who might be in physical danger”. Whether or not online content is PUBLIC is an important contextual factor (because of course if it’s not public, that’s a problem), but in my opinion should not be the only thing relevant for this decision. Though it’s also worth pointing out that if the tweet is something that could actually lead to harm, the issue isn’t publishing the handle or not - because public tweets can be easily searched. In that case, it might be better not to quote a tweet verbatim, or to use composites. As Tarleton says, the issue is whether a certain use is required to describe the work, which goes to a cost/benefit analysis. If it’s a tweet about breakfast that should be a different analysis than a tweet about a health condition. For the latter, you might want a more compelling reason for why the tweet needs to be there. The account name issue is even more tricky because depending on the context, it is possible there could be harm by not giving someone CREDIT for their content. But unless that kind of thing is likely - given what Nick and I found, unless there’s a reason that a handle has explanatory value it seems to just add another layer of potential discomfort for the unknowing research participants. That said, there are different norms in different communities about this kind of thing. What I’d like most to see is ethical analyses beyond “is it public or not” and for those analyses to be surfaced in the writing. So regardless of decisions, explaining them as part of methods would be great! Casey On Jul 13, 2018, at 9:27 AM, Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu<mailto:tlg28@cornell.edu>> wrote: Out of curiosity, I scanned through Twitter's ToS and related policies; I didn't see anything indicating how they want a tweet to be cited. Maybe it did in earlier versions, or I just missed it. But even so, it's not clear how Twitter's ToS has any standing or relevance to what a researcher does, as they're not the person contracting with Twitter in that contract. We could take their advice in to account, but I think Nick and Casey's point is the right one. What's the added value to the research of including the person's Twitter handle in the publication, such that it overcomes the possible discomfort and possible harm it could bring? It's surprising to me how often adding the handle / the name of the speaker / the interviewee really doesn't add to the analysis -- that we may be doing it more because it's what journalists do, or because we want to perform that it’s a legit tweet, or out of habit. Our instinct should not be how much can I publish based on what rights I think people have given up, but how far can I go to protect people and still make the cogent analysis the discussion requires. Tarleton On 7/13/18, 11:17 AM, "Air-L on behalf of Proferes, Nicholas" <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of nproferes@uky.edu<mailto:nproferes@uky.edu>> wrote: Hi all, Casey Fiesler and I recently published an article on Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366). One of our findings from the study was that when we asked, "How would you feel if a Tweet of yours was used in a research study and your Tweet was quoted in a published research paper, attributed to your Twitter handle?" only about ~24% of respondents indicated that they would be comfortable with this. There's obviously a lot of situations in which including Twitter handles is appropriate (quoting public figures seems like a pretty clear cut case), but I do think it might be worth taking user expectations into consideration in that contextual decision, particularly if you are working with populations subject to harassment/bullying. Cheers, Nick ________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org>> on behalf of Judith Rosenbaum-Andre <judith.rosenbaumandre@maine.edu<mailto:judith.rosenbaumandre@maine.edu>> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:45:06 AM To: daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk<mailto:daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk> Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets I just recently published a book on Twitter, race, and gender, and my publisher was very insistent I did use people's Twitter handles. For clarification, I used all publicly available tweets. I went back and forth on it myself a few times (and still every once in a while wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "did I do the right thing?!"), but ended up agreeing with them. Their argument, per Twitter's ToS, was that people's tweets should be treated as you would an in-text citation (e.g., "Hayes said"), as they are their thoughts and ideas, expressed in a public forum, and thus they have earned the right to be credited for them (almost on a par with copyright). Because I used public tweets anyone could and can still find the tweets even if I hadn't listed the screen name, which renders the argument that we need to protect their identity somewhat moot. In my book, I discuss some pretty awful statements though, and I did make sure to not choose tweets as examples that could really get people into trouble with their employer, for instance, and would instead use more innocuous tweets to illustrate my point. This kind of research, because I use public tweets, falls outside of our IRB's scope, as they consider it public information on a par with analyzing media content and thus non-human-subjects research. I don't know if this helps at all - I think it's a tough issue to deal with, and both decisions, like you said, have their pros and cons. On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:27 AM Daniel Thomas < daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk<mailto:daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk>> wrote: 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<mailto: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? 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Hi Becky, Regarding your last messages - anonymizing tweets does not air on plagiarism (in my opinion) because you are not claiming the tweets as your own. Regarding the discussion at large - a middle ground between anonymizing and not anonymizing tweets (as Casey just beat me to mentioning) would perhaps be to request the consent of the individuals who made the tweets that you wish to publish. I'm also a bit concerned with word "names" being used perhaps interchangeably with "twitter handles." Twitter handles can change hands, and there are various examples you can find online of people offering to pay others for their twitter handles because the handle matches their real name, business identity, etc. While I'm not asserting that this is a common occurrence, there is always the chance that you may unintentionally misattribute a non-anonymized tweet for this reason. (Requesting consent would address this issue). -Doug On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 1:25 PM, Casey Lynn Fiesler < Casey.Fiesler@colorado.edu> wrote:
Particularly given the kinds of concerns Rebecca has brought up, keep in mind that another option is to ask permission to publish content, or to ask whether they would like their handle included or not. If it’s a small number this might not be very arduous. You then might choose to include content if you don’t hear back from them - that you’re only checking for people who express discomfort. Here is a paper with an ethical considerations section at the end where they explain a process like this: http://jesspater.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Hunger-Hurts-but-Starving- Works.pdf
Casey
On Jul 13, 2018, at 10:52 AM, Hayes, Rebecca M <hayes2r@cmich.edu<mailto: hayes2r@cmich.edu>> wrote:
Also I, of course, considered more than "it is public" but extensively whether I think it causes harm either way.
Thanks Again,
Becky
________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l-bounces@ listserv.aoir.org>> on behalf of Hayes, Rebecca M <hayes2r@cmich.edu <mailto:hayes2r@cmich.edu>> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:43:02 PM To: Jacobs, Naomi; air-l@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
I really appreciate this discussion. It has helped me think through a lot. At first I had deleted all names. But I want to clarify that I am using tweets as examples in my book, for discussions of particular hashtags. In all there are 12 tweets. All of them are demonstrating an example, and in a positive light. After these discussions we chose to delete the one example that was critical.
My main concern after all of this discussion and why I think I should include the names (in this case), is because who am I to not cite other peoples work? It airs on plagirism if I do not. And as academic I think we often fall into a paternalistic mindset thinking we know better than people about what they want or what they know. This is a public forum and we have to expect and respect that they know that, and in my case none of the public tweets I am using are presenting the users in negative ways (that I know of). This was such a hard decision to make!
Again thank you. This has been a very helpful discussion and I think that context matters in every one of these decisions.
Best, Becky ________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l-bounces@ listserv.aoir.org>> on behalf of Jacobs, Naomi <naomi.jacobs@abdn.ac.uk< mailto:naomi.jacobs@abdn.ac.uk>> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:28:43 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
Hi all,
I agree with those suggesting that context is important, and that the consideration should be what harm may be caused.
In terms of potential solutions for anonymity, in some recent work (in press) I took the decision to anonymise the content of tweets by changing each quoted tweet in one of the following two ways: by either swapping words or phrases in a linked clause, or by substituting a word for a close synonym. This hopefully retained the content and emotional weight while preventing a simple search for the tweet. This is in a case study of conflict between members of a particular online community, and a commercial organisation.
By contrast, in a different context where the quoted tweet was a neutral statement related to an experience had by the user in their daily life, I contacted them to ask permission to quote verbatim with their username (and was granted it).
Naomi
Dr Naomi Jacobs Research Fellow TrustLens Project Department of Computing Science University of Aberdeen
+44 (0)1224 274564
-----Original Message----- From: Air-L [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Casey Lynn Fiesler Sent: 13 July 2018 17:08 To: Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu<mailto:tlg28@cornell.edu>> Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
Nick already mentioned out recent research about this, but I’ll just chime in and add a few thoughts:
It hasn’t come up at all what the subject matter of the papers/books are. I think that this is really relevant to an ethical analysis of this situation, because it goes to potential harm. There’s a big difference between “here is a tweet from someone talking about what they had for breakfast” and “here is a tweet from someone showing signs of a mental illness” or “here is a tweet from a political dissident who might be in physical danger”. Whether or not online content is PUBLIC is an important contextual factor (because of course if it’s not public, that’s a problem), but in my opinion should not be the only thing relevant for this decision.
Though it’s also worth pointing out that if the tweet is something that could actually lead to harm, the issue isn’t publishing the handle or not - because public tweets can be easily searched. In that case, it might be better not to quote a tweet verbatim, or to use composites.
As Tarleton says, the issue is whether a certain use is required to describe the work, which goes to a cost/benefit analysis. If it’s a tweet about breakfast that should be a different analysis than a tweet about a health condition. For the latter, you might want a more compelling reason for why the tweet needs to be there.
The account name issue is even more tricky because depending on the context, it is possible there could be harm by not giving someone CREDIT for their content. But unless that kind of thing is likely - given what Nick and I found, unless there’s a reason that a handle has explanatory value it seems to just add another layer of potential discomfort for the unknowing research participants.
That said, there are different norms in different communities about this kind of thing. What I’d like most to see is ethical analyses beyond “is it public or not” and for those analyses to be surfaced in the writing. So regardless of decisions, explaining them as part of methods would be great!
Casey
On Jul 13, 2018, at 9:27 AM, Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu <mailto:tlg28@cornell.edu>> wrote:
Out of curiosity, I scanned through Twitter's ToS and related policies; I didn't see anything indicating how they want a tweet to be cited. Maybe it did in earlier versions, or I just missed it. But even so, it's not clear how Twitter's ToS has any standing or relevance to what a researcher does, as they're not the person contracting with Twitter in that contract. We could take their advice in to account, but I think Nick and Casey's point is the right one. What's the added value to the research of including the person's Twitter handle in the publication, such that it overcomes the possible discomfort and possible harm it could bring? It's surprising to me how often adding the handle / the name of the speaker / the interviewee really doesn't add to the analysis -- that we may be doing it more because it's what journalists do, or because we want to perform that it’s a legit tweet, or out of habit. Our instinct should not be how much can I publish based on what rights I think people have given up, but how far can I go to protect people and still make the cogent analysis the discussion requires.
Tarleton
On 7/13/18, 11:17 AM, "Air-L on behalf of Proferes, Nicholas" < air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of nproferes@uky.edu<mailto:nproferes@uky.edu>> wrote:
Hi all,
Casey Fiesler and I recently published an article on Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research (http://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366).
One of our findings from the study was that when we asked, "How would you feel if a Tweet of yours was used in a research study and your Tweet was quoted in a published research paper, attributed to your Twitter handle?" only about ~24% of respondents indicated that they would be comfortable with this.
There's obviously a lot of situations in which including Twitter handles is appropriate (quoting public figures seems like a pretty clear cut case), but I do think it might be worth taking user expectations into consideration in that contextual decision, particularly if you are working with populations subject to harassment/bullying.
Cheers,
Nick
________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l-bounces@ listserv.aoir.org>> on behalf of Judith Rosenbaum-Andre < judith.rosenbaumandre@maine.edu<mailto:judith.rosenbaumandre@maine.edu>> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:45:06 AM To: daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk<mailto:daniel.thomas--airl@ cl.cam.ac.uk> Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
I just recently published a book on Twitter, race, and gender, and my publisher was very insistent I did use people's Twitter handles. For clarification, I used all publicly available tweets. I went back and forth on it myself a few times (and still every once in a while wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "did I do the right thing?!"), but ended up agreeing with them. Their argument, per Twitter's ToS, was that people's tweets should be treated as you would an in-text citation (e.g., "Hayes said"), as they are their thoughts and ideas, expressed in a public forum, and thus they have earned the right to be credited for them (almost on a par with copyright). Because I used public tweets anyone could and can still find the tweets even if I hadn't listed the screen name, which renders the argument that we need to protect their identity somewhat moot. In my book, I discuss some pretty awful statements though, and I did make sure to not choose tweets as examples that could really get people into trouble with their employer, for instance, and would instead use more innocuous tweets to illustrate my point. This kind of research, because I use public tweets, falls outside of our IRB's scope, as they consider it public information on a par with analyzing media content and thus non-human-subjects research. I don't know if this helps at all - I think it's a tough issue to deal with, and both decisions, like you said, have their pros and cons.
On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:27 AM Daniel Thomas < daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk<mailto:daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk>> wrote:
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<mailto: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?
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And I'd suggest Casey's earlier article, "When Should We Use Real Names in Published Accounts of Internet Research?" It is Chapter 11 in: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digital-research-confidential Christian On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 11:17 AM, Proferes, Nicholas <nproferes@uky.edu> wrote:
Hi all,
Casey Fiesler and I recently published an article on Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research (http://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366).
One of our findings from the study was that when we asked, "How would you feel if a Tweet of yours was used in a research study and your Tweet was quoted in a published research paper, attributed to your Twitter handle?" only about ~24% of respondents indicated that they would be comfortable with this.
There's obviously a lot of situations in which including Twitter handles is appropriate (quoting public figures seems like a pretty clear cut case), but I do think it might be worth taking user expectations into consideration in that contextual decision, particularly if you are working with populations subject to harassment/bullying.
Cheers,
Nick
________________________________ From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Judith Rosenbaum-Andre <judith.rosenbaumandre@maine.edu> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:45:06 AM To: daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
I just recently published a book on Twitter, race, and gender, and my publisher was very insistent I did use people's Twitter handles. For clarification, I used all publicly available tweets. I went back and forth on it myself a few times (and still every once in a while wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "did I do the right thing?!"), but ended up agreeing with them. Their argument, per Twitter's ToS, was that people's tweets should be treated as you would an in-text citation (e.g., "Hayes said"), as they are their thoughts and ideas, expressed in a public forum, and thus they have earned the right to be credited for them (almost on a par with copyright). Because I used public tweets anyone could and can still find the tweets even if I hadn't listed the screen name, which renders the argument that we need to protect their identity somewhat moot. In my book, I discuss some pretty awful statements though, and I did make sure to not choose tweets as examples that could really get people into trouble with their employer, for instance, and would instead use more innocuous tweets to illustrate my point. This kind of research, because I use public tweets, falls outside of our IRB's scope, as they consider it public information on a par with analyzing media content and thus non-human-subjects research. I don't know if this helps at all - I think it's a tough issue to deal with, and both decisions, like you said, have their pros and cons.
On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:27 AM Daniel Thomas < daniel.thomas--airl@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
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?
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Hi, a few thoughts ... Screen names are often creations/public projections and forms of agency, important/expressive in their own way. Signature selections are integral to the full social media message. Exclusion, then, is a form of censorship. If you choose to exclude, you will have to explain why. If the only reason is because someone who uses social media may not understand that their content is public and can therefore (legally) be reproduced or re-mediated on any platform, the same logic could apply to reproducing public content of any type. Very risky. The only cases I could justify such editorializing (selecting which parts of a communication to share) parallel general defamation and hate speech limitations. Social media is public, and of the public sphere; those who want to create private/privileged communication use peer-to-peer, offline, direct messaging, telephone *et al.* Paula *Paula Todd* B.A., LLB.(J.D.), PhD Can. (Digital Journalism) York & Ryerson Universities Toronto, Canada On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 2:23 AM, Hayes, Rebecca M <hayes2r@cmich.edu> 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
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I think someone who administers IRB would disagree. Even if we take tweets to be public statements, and even if we the users in this case fully understood them as public, there are different values to think about. As researchers, our obligation is to recognize that including people in our work, however valuable to the research, can come at a cost for the people made into subjects of that research; part of the commitment to being a researcher then means respecting people's autonomy and treating them ethically, "not only by respecting their decisions and protecting them from harm, but also by making efforts to secure their well-being" (http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/EP/EP713_ResearchEthics/EP713_Res...) Instead of "If you choose to exclude, you will have to explain why" I think IRB principles would say it’s the reverse: if you're including the identity of your research subjects, you will have to explain why -- and probably to them. Paula, by the end your comment seems to imply that what's at issue is whether to quote the tweet itself ("very risky"), but I think all that is being discussed here is identifying its author. I totally have the gut instinct to want to credit people, it's deeply ingrained in how we work. But the tweets in this case are not secondary sources of scholarship, they're being selected and used as examples. Other tweets could similarly have been chosen to make the same point. Their value is not that they were posted by person X, but that they sound a certain way or address a certain topic. I would err on the side of protecting the person, because I can't anticipate the harm and can't anticipate their framework for understanding and can't anticipate how they'd feel about their words being used as an object of my research -- unless, of course, I sought their actual consent, as Casey suggested. This conversation is really helping me think about this, thanks all. Tarleton On 7/13/18, 1:46 PM, "Air-L on behalf of paula todd" <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org on behalf of paulatoddmedia@gmail.com> wrote: Hi, a few thoughts ... Screen names are often creations/public projections and forms of agency, important/expressive in their own way. Signature selections are integral to the full social media message. Exclusion, then, is a form of censorship. If you choose to exclude, you will have to explain why. If the only reason is because someone who uses social media may not understand that their content is public and can therefore (legally) be reproduced or re-mediated on any platform, the same logic could apply to reproducing public content of any type. Very risky. The only cases I could justify such editorializing (selecting which parts of a communication to share) parallel general defamation and hate speech limitations. Social media is public, and of the public sphere; those who want to create private/privileged communication use peer-to-peer, offline, direct messaging, telephone *et al.* Paula *Paula Todd* B.A., LLB.(J.D.), PhD Can. (Digital Journalism) York & Ryerson Universities Toronto, Canada On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 2:23 AM, Hayes, Rebecca M <hayes2r@cmich.edu> 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/ > - _______________________________________________ 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/
This is a great discussion, and I’m glad to be part of it. It occurs to me that the fact people on this list in particular don’t have a hard and fast answers demonstrates what a tricky issue this is. I don’t have the answer either, but for what its worth I can share my own approach and thoughts. I’ve collected from Twitter and other social media channels for a project dating back to 2013. The tweets in my particularly instance are volunteered to a specific, unique hashtag (#harkive), rather than harvested from keywords. Even so, I’ve taken the decision not to use usernames in articles/chapters/presentations. I provide a way via my project website for people to have their data permanently removed but, as I guess we all know, anyone who enters the text of a tweet into Google will almost certainly be able to find the original author if they want to. Once a tweet and/or a username is printed in a physical book, or a PDF made available online, then I would see that as beyond my control - in other words, removing a tweet from my database would not remove it from the copies in circulation. My feeling is that excluding usernames mitigates potential risks somewhat, but it doesn’t remove those risks entirely. If I were working with data harvested from keywords - and if consent had not been given - then I would have misgivings about both verbatim quotes and usernames, and certainly if the subject matter of the tweets and/or article had any obvious potential to cause harm. Kind regards Craig
On 13 Jul 2018, at 19:13, Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu> wrote:
I think someone who administers IRB would disagree. Even if we take tweets to be public statements, and even if we the users in this case fully understood them as public, there are different values to think about. As researchers, our obligation is to recognize that including people in our work, however valuable to the research, can come at a cost for the people made into subjects of that research; part of the commitment to being a researcher then means respecting people's autonomy and treating them ethically, "not only by respecting their decisions and protecting them from harm, but also by making efforts to secure their well-being" (http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/EP/EP713_ResearchEthics/EP713_Res...) Instead of "If you choose to exclude, you will have to explain why" I think IRB principles would say it’s the reverse: if you're including the identity of your research subjects, you will have to explain why -- and probably to them.
Paula, by the end your comment seems to imply that what's at issue is whether to quote the tweet itself ("very risky"), but I think all that is being discussed here is identifying its author. I totally have the gut instinct to want to credit people, it's deeply ingrained in how we work. But the tweets in this case are not secondary sources of scholarship, they're being selected and used as examples. Other tweets could similarly have been chosen to make the same point. Their value is not that they were posted by person X, but that they sound a certain way or address a certain topic. I would err on the side of protecting the person, because I can't anticipate the harm and can't anticipate their framework for understanding and can't anticipate how they'd feel about their words being used as an object of my research -- unless, of course, I sought their actual consent, as Casey suggested.
This conversation is really helping me think about this, thanks all.
Tarleton
On 7/13/18, 1:46 PM, "Air-L on behalf of paula todd" <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org on behalf of paulatoddmedia@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, a few thoughts ... Screen names are often creations/public projections and forms of agency, important/expressive in their own way. Signature selections are integral to the full social media message. Exclusion, then, is a form of censorship. If you choose to exclude, you will have to explain why. If the only reason is because someone who uses social media may not understand that their content is public and can therefore (legally) be reproduced or re-mediated on any platform, the same logic could apply to reproducing public content of any type. Very risky. The only cases I could justify such editorializing (selecting which parts of a communication to share) parallel general defamation and hate speech limitations. Social media is public, and of the public sphere; those who want to create private/privileged communication use peer-to-peer, offline, direct messaging, telephone *et al.*
Paula
*Paula Todd* B.A., LLB.(J.D.), PhD Can. (Digital Journalism) York & Ryerson Universities Toronto, Canada
On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 2:23 AM, Hayes, Rebecca M <hayes2r@cmich.edu> 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
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An intriguing conversation, and one I have recently tackled in my own work with social media and crisis communication. I believe that it is the obligation of the researcher to protect the privacy of the social media participants- even if the SM participant chose to universally post their content as public. My view is they are doing so at the moment -- and while the *content* may linger -- the *intention* may not. In my work with crisis Tweets-- I created a synthesis of the content - by exploring major topics and themes, through QCA. I agree with @Nick Proferes and I appreciate his link to the paper. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366 For other considerations please see the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society https://bdes.datasociety.net/ Good Luck -- On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 2:32 PM Craig Hamilton <Craig.Hamilton@bcu.ac.uk> wrote:
This is a great discussion, and I’m glad to be part of it. It occurs to me that the fact people on this list in particular don’t have a hard and fast answers demonstrates what a tricky issue this is. I don’t have the answer either, but for what its worth I can share my own approach and thoughts.
I’ve collected from Twitter and other social media channels for a project dating back to 2013. The tweets in my particularly instance are volunteered to a specific, unique hashtag (#harkive), rather than harvested from keywords. Even so, I’ve taken the decision not to use usernames in articles/chapters/presentations. I provide a way via my project website for people to have their data permanently removed but, as I guess we all know, anyone who enters the text of a tweet into Google will almost certainly be able to find the original author if they want to. Once a tweet and/or a username is printed in a physical book, or a PDF made available online, then I would see that as beyond my control - in other words, removing a tweet from my database would not remove it from the copies in circulation. My feeling is that excluding usernames mitigates potential risks somewhat, but it doesn’t remove those risks entirely. If I were working with data harvested from keywords - and if consent had not been given - then I would have misgivings about both verbatim quotes and usernames, and certainly if the subject matter of the tweets and/or article had any obvious potential to cause harm.
Kind regards Craig
On 13 Jul 2018, at 19:13, Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu> wrote:
I think someone who administers IRB would disagree. Even if we take tweets to be public statements, and even if we the users in this case fully understood them as public, there are different values to think about. As researchers, our obligation is to recognize that including people in our work, however valuable to the research, can come at a cost for the people made into subjects of that research; part of the commitment to being a researcher then means respecting people's autonomy and treating them ethically, "not only by respecting their decisions and protecting them from harm, but also by making efforts to secure their well-being" ( http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/EP/EP713_ResearchEthics/EP713_Res...) Instead of "If you choose to exclude, you will have to explain why" I think IRB principles would say it’s the reverse: if you're including the identity of your research subjects, you will have to explain why -- and probably to them.
Paula, by the end your comment seems to imply that what's at issue is whether to quote the tweet itself ("very risky"), but I think all that is being discussed here is identifying its author. I totally have the gut instinct to want to credit people, it's deeply ingrained in how we work. But the tweets in this case are not secondary sources of scholarship, they're being selected and used as examples. Other tweets could similarly have been chosen to make the same point. Their value is not that they were posted by person X, but that they sound a certain way or address a certain topic. I would err on the side of protecting the person, because I can't anticipate the harm and can't anticipate their framework for understanding and can't anticipate how they'd feel about their words being used as an object of my research -- unless, of course, I sought their actual consent, as Casey suggested.
This conversation is really helping me think about this, thanks all.
Tarleton
On 7/13/18, 1:46 PM, "Air-L on behalf of paula todd" < air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org on behalf of paulatoddmedia@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, a few thoughts ... Screen names are often creations/public projections and forms of agency, important/expressive in their own way. Signature selections are integral to the full social media message. Exclusion, then, is a form of censorship. If you choose to exclude, you will have to explain why. If the only reason is because someone who uses social media may not understand that their content is public and can therefore (legally) be reproduced or re-mediated on any platform, the same logic could apply to reproducing public content of any type. Very risky. The only cases I could justify such editorializing (selecting which parts of a communication to share) parallel general defamation and hate speech limitations. Social media is public, and of the public sphere; those who want to create private/privileged communication use peer-to-peer, offline, direct messaging, telephone *et al.*
Paula
*Paula Todd* B.A., LLB.(J.D.), PhD Can. (Digital Journalism) York & Ryerson Universities Toronto, Canada
On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 2:23 AM, Hayes, Rebecca M <hayes2r@cmich.edu> 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
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Dear all, dear Rebecca, thanks for raising this issue - the trend seems to be not to include the screennames into publications. But I have a couple of thoughts on this as a researcher who has dealt with influencers on Twitter in cross-country perspective. 1. The dubious status of a tweet as 'oral-written' seems to lie at the bottom of your hesitations. If you treat tweets as oral statements produced in private, you will need authors' consent to publish AND a reference to the source. If you treat them as published documents, you will only need a reference to the source. But at the same time, be it oral or written, you need to protect the source from potential harm - this comes not only from judicial but also from journalistic practice. Hence, evaluation (public interest against potential harm) is needed in each individual case. The scholarly community, just as the journalistic community 50 years before that, might wish to elaborate a sort of a list of potentially harmful cases or recommendations on how to evaluate this. Some additional comments that also come from journalistic practice: 1. There is research where accounts of public persons and institutions are under scrutiny. E.g. see the works on whether people address police or civil servants on Twitter in times of crises or natural disasters. Here, research loses its sense if the names are not stated. Here, public interest might definitely be higher than potential harm. In journalism, public people may be photographed when killed (see the case of Uwe Barshel in Germany, an old but highly exemplary one), chased for cheating on their spouses, asked harsh quetions, etc. They need to be ready to get under public attention and scholarly analysis. But, again, the scholarly community needs to find ways to define public figures on Twitter and maybe treat them different than 'ordinary people'. Or, are all the accounts now 'public figures'? Or, are all the accounts now private (and what to do then with the curated accounts of politicians and brands)? 2. What is identifying a user? Is it providing the screenname, or ID, or claiming we know the real name? For most of us, there is no chance to prove that a particular account is really an account by a particular offline person; we're only suggesting that. Formally, we can only state that this or that account is called this way and tells this or that publicly. But even this can lead to potential harm to a given user, as naming an account / screenname in research (say, on anorexia, hate speech, radical nationalism etc.) can lead to cyberbullying and virtual attacks. Thus, not only the necessity should be weighted; but also the community needs to develop least harmful ways of identifying the sources of tweets. Sorry if my considerations are banal :) Yours, Svetlana On Fri, 13 Jul 2018 06:23:14 +0000 "Hayes, Rebecca M" <hayes2r@cmich.edu> 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
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-- Svetlana S. Bodrunova, Prof., D.Polit.Sci. Head, Center for International Media Research School of Journalism and Mass Communications, St.Petersburg State University +7 921 933 02 14 spasibo-tebe@yandex.ru
Just wanted to add my appreciation for this discussion! The distinctions and deliberations that are emerging are very much in tune with my recent experience of helping my PhD students negotiate their ethics applications. One thing I don’t think anyone has mentioned (unless I have missed it) in this discussion is the possibility of including links to tweets, rather than the original text of the tweets, in publications. This means that as long as the users responsible for the tweets in question have not deleted them, they are available in full to readers of the publication, but they are not made “more permanent” by their inclusion in a new context. This may help solve some of the problems that we have heard about in this discussion, though it is of course not without its own problems (e.g. people changing their names over time could have an impact on analyses where names carry information value). I hasten to add that this is not my idea - unfortunatlely I can’t remember where I first read about this practice. Best, Johnny Dr J W Unger Lecturer and Academic Director of Summer Programmes Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University LA1 4YL e-mail: j.unger@lancaster.ac.uk<mailto:j.unger@lancaster.ac.uk> tel: +44 1524 592591<tel:+44%201524%20592591> Follow me on Twitter @johnnyunger<http://twitter.com/#!/johnnyunger> On 14 Jul 2018, 00:20 +0100, Бодрунова Светлана Сергеевна <s.bodrunova@spbu.ru>, wrote: Dear all, dear Rebecca, thanks for raising this issue - the trend seems to be not to include the screennames into publications. But I have a couple of thoughts on this as a researcher who has dealt with influencers on Twitter in cross-country perspective. 1. The dubious status of a tweet as 'oral-written' seems to lie at the bottom of your hesitations. If you treat tweets as oral statements produced in private, you will need authors' consent to publish AND a reference to the source. If you treat them as published documents, you will only need a reference to the source. But at the same time, be it oral or written, you need to protect the source from potential harm - this comes not only from judicial but also from journalistic practice. Hence, evaluation (public interest against potential harm) is needed in each individual case. The scholarly community, just as the journalistic community 50 years before that, might wish to elaborate a sort of a list of potentially harmful cases or recommendations on how to evaluate this. Some additional comments that also come from journalistic practice: 1. There is research where accounts of public persons and institutions are under scrutiny. E.g. see the works on whether people address police or civil servants on Twitter in times of crises or natural disasters. Here, research loses its sense if the names are not stated. Here, public interest might definitely be higher than potential harm. In journalism, public people may be photographed when killed (see the case of Uwe Barshel in Germany, an old but highly exemplary one), chased for cheating on their spouses, asked harsh quetions, etc. They need to be ready to get under public attention and scholarly analysis. But, again, the scholarly community needs to find ways to define public figures on Twitter and maybe treat them different than 'ordinary people'. Or, are all the accounts now 'public figures'? Or, are all the accounts now private (and what to do then with the curated accounts of politicians and brands)? 2. What is identifying a user? Is it providing the screenname, or ID, or claiming we know the real name? For most of us, there is no chance to prove that a particular account is really an account by a particular offline person; we're only suggesting that. Formally, we can only state that this or that account is called this way and tells this or that publicly. But even this can lead to potential harm to a given user, as naming an account / screenname in research (say, on anorexia, hate speech, radical nationalism etc.) can lead to cyberbullying and virtual attacks. Thus, not only the necessity should be weighted; but also the community needs to develop least harmful ways of identifying the sources of tweets. Sorry if my considerations are banal :) Yours, Svetlana On Fri, 13 Jul 2018 06:23:14 +0000 "Hayes, Rebecca M" <hayes2r@cmich.edu> 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/ -- Svetlana S. Bodrunova, Prof., D.Polit.Sci. Head, Center for International Media Research School of Journalism and Mass Communications, St.Petersburg State University +7 921 933 02 14<tel:+7%20921%20933%2002%2014> spasibo-tebe@yandex.ru _______________________________________________ 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/
Thanks everyone for the discussion on this important issue. I just want to share my two cents as someone who studies social media in authoritarian regimes. As you will find, I have concerns and questions, but not a solution. Yet, the discussion on issues like this, though seem trivial to some, is essential. As "social scientists," providing as much as information about the citation seems to be desirable as that makes our research more transparent and replicable. However, this is not a good option given the ethical considerations, especially in terms of preserving the privacy of the our research subjects, who often "participate" in our research involuntarily in that we cannot obtain their permission before citing them as some colleagues have pointed out here. The problem is even worse for those who do research in more constrained environment because (1) data availability is often a bigger challenge; (2) those who we cite may face more serious repercussions if their identity is revealed. I have generally tried to anonymize whoever I quote or cite when the issue at discussion is considered controversial or politically sensitive. I say "tried" because first, it is impossible to really anonymize the source if we actually quote or cite someone whose statement is publicly available, and second, the journals, book publishers, and the disciplines in general often require us to at least provide some "identifying information" such as the URL links. In this regard, my effort might be in vain. However, I still try every time whenever possible because of the very simple logic--we need to protect our subjects. In a sense, people like me are challenging the established norms of academic research that emphasize the scientific aspect of the process. But I feel we are obliged to do what we do. After all, even though a particular statement is there and the social media user put it up voluntarily and does not mind if people or even the government reads out it, the very fact that we include it in an academic paper/book (not to say our interpretation and analysis of it) may change everything. We are singling it out and highlighting it, thus can potentially catch the attention from the state or other suppressive or bullying forces. That's why I constantly worry that we are not doing enough to project who we study. Thanks to everyone again and I appreciate your input. Rongbin Han Assistant Professor Department of International Affairs University of Georgia Contesting Cyberspace in China <https://cup.columbia.edu/book/contesting-cyberspace-in-china/9780231184755> (Columbia University Press) On Sat, Jul 14, 2018 at 12:59 PM, Unger, Johann <j.unger@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
Just wanted to add my appreciation for this discussion! The distinctions and deliberations that are emerging are very much in tune with my recent experience of helping my PhD students negotiate their ethics applications.
One thing I don’t think anyone has mentioned (unless I have missed it) in this discussion is the possibility of including links to tweets, rather than the original text of the tweets, in publications. This means that as long as the users responsible for the tweets in question have not deleted them, they are available in full to readers of the publication, but they are not made “more permanent” by their inclusion in a new context. This may help solve some of the problems that we have heard about in this discussion, though it is of course not without its own problems (e.g. people changing their names over time could have an impact on analyses where names carry information value).
I hasten to add that this is not my idea - unfortunatlely I can’t remember where I first read about this practice.
Best, Johnny
Dr J W Unger Lecturer and Academic Director of Summer Programmes Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University LA1 4YL
e-mail: j.unger@lancaster.ac.uk<mailto:j.unger@lancaster.ac.uk> tel: +44 1524 592591<tel:+44%201524%20592591> Follow me on Twitter @johnnyunger<http://twitter.com/#!/johnnyunger> On 14 Jul 2018, 00:20 +0100, Бодрунова Светлана Сергеевна < s.bodrunova@spbu.ru>, wrote: Dear all, dear Rebecca, thanks for raising this issue - the trend seems to be not to include the screennames into publications. But I have a couple of thoughts on this as a researcher who has dealt with influencers on Twitter in cross-country perspective.
1. The dubious status of a tweet as 'oral-written' seems to lie at the bottom of your hesitations. If you treat tweets as oral statements produced in private, you will need authors' consent to publish AND a reference to the source. If you treat them as published documents, you will only need a reference to the source. But at the same time, be it oral or written, you need to protect the source from potential harm - this comes not only from judicial but also from journalistic practice. Hence, evaluation (public interest against potential harm) is needed in each individual case. The scholarly community, just as the journalistic community 50 years before that, might wish to elaborate a sort of a list of potentially harmful cases or recommendations on how to evaluate this.
Some additional comments that also come from journalistic practice:
1. There is research where accounts of public persons and institutions are under scrutiny. E.g. see the works on whether people address police or civil servants on Twitter in times of crises or natural disasters. Here, research loses its sense if the names are not stated. Here, public interest might definitely be higher than potential harm.
In journalism, public people may be photographed when killed (see the case of Uwe Barshel in Germany, an old but highly exemplary one), chased for cheating on their spouses, asked harsh quetions, etc. They need to be ready to get under public attention and scholarly analysis. But, again, the scholarly community needs to find ways to define public figures on Twitter and maybe treat them different than 'ordinary people'. Or, are all the accounts now 'public figures'? Or, are all the accounts now private (and what to do then with the curated accounts of politicians and brands)?
2. What is identifying a user? Is it providing the screenname, or ID, or claiming we know the real name? For most of us, there is no chance to prove that a particular account is really an account by a particular offline person; we're only suggesting that. Formally, we can only state that this or that account is called this way and tells this or that publicly. But even this can lead to potential harm to a given user, as naming an account / screenname in research (say, on anorexia, hate speech, radical nationalism etc.) can lead to cyberbullying and virtual attacks. Thus, not only the necessity should be weighted; but also the community needs to develop least harmful ways of identifying the sources of tweets.
Sorry if my considerations are banal :)
Yours, Svetlana
On Fri, 13 Jul 2018 06:23:14 +0000 "Hayes, Rebecca M" <hayes2r@cmich.edu> 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/
-- Svetlana S. Bodrunova, Prof., D.Polit.Sci. Head, Center for International Media Research School of Journalism and Mass Communications, St.Petersburg State University
+7 921 933 02 14<tel:+7%20921%20933%2002%2014> spasibo-tebe@yandex.ru _______________________________________________ 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/ _______________________________________________ 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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participants (15)
-
Casey Lynn Fiesler -
Christian Sandvig -
Craig Hamilton -
Daniel Thomas -
f hodgkins -
Hayes, Rebecca M -
Jacobs, Naomi -
Judith Rosenbaum-Andre -
paula todd -
Proferes, Nicholas -
Rongbin Han -
Tarleton L. Gillespie -
Unger, Johann -
Zytko, Douglas -
Бодрунова Светлана С ергеевна