Anonymizing Twitter handles
Dear subscribers to Association of Internet Researchers, I am currently going through IRB process for a research on Twitter data and I was told to anonymize Twitter handles completely. Are there any online programs with which I could anonymize usernames? I don`t think I should create fake Twitter handles for every single tweet that I quote on my paper. I`d really appreciate any suggestions on anonymizing Twitter handles! Thank you in advance!
Frankly, I don’t see much value in anonymizing the Twitter handle if you will be publishing the original content of the tweet, which I could search and identify the source with minimal effort. Michael -- Michael Zimmer, PhD Associate Professor, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu t: @michaelzimmer w: www.michaelzimmer.org
On Apr 13, 2017, at 10:11 PM, Ye Na Lee <jpt2007@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Dear subscribers to Association of Internet Researchers, I am currently going through IRB process for a research on Twitter data and I was told to anonymize Twitter handles completely. Are there any online programs with which I could anonymize usernames? I don`t think I should create fake Twitter handles for every single tweet that I quote on my paper. I`d really appreciate any suggestions on anonymizing Twitter handles! Thank you in advance! _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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This could be an opportunity to educate your IRB on social media research, as not all IRBs understand the implications of what they ask researchers to do (I speak from personal experience here). As others have stated, anonymization of Twitter data is both difficult logistically and can impede analysis and presentation of results. At the same time, even with such a public platform, these concerns must be balanced against users' rights and interests. But there are ways other than anonymization to accomplish this. In our recent report on the Black Lives Matter movement's use of social media, we took three steps to address the privacy and intellectual property concerns of the users whose tweets we cited as examples: * Posting links to tweets rather than reproducing their full text. * Linking only to tweets that had collected a minimum of 100 retweets. * Linking only to tweets posted by users who had at least 3,000 followers or were Twitter-verified. We feel these steps helped achieve a balance between our interests as researchers, the audience's interest in understanding the phenomenon, and participants' interests in not having their content appropriated inappropriately. You can read more about these steps on p. 86 of the report, which is available here: http://cmsimpact.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/beyond_the_hashtags_2016.pdf /DEEN On 4/13/2017 11:11 PM, Ye Na Lee wrote:
Dear subscribers to Association of Internet Researchers, I am currently going through IRB process for a research on Twitter data and I was told to anonymize Twitter handles completely. Are there any online programs with which I could anonymize usernames? I don`t think I should create fake Twitter handles for every single tweet that I quote on my paper. I`d really appreciate any suggestions on anonymizing Twitter handles! Thank you in advance! _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Deen Freelon, Ph.D. Associate Professor School of Communication, American University Office: McKinley 325 freelon@american.edu | http://dfreelon.org | @dfreelon <https://twitter.com/dfreelon> New report: Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice <http://www.cmsimpact.org/blmreport>
I agree with Deen regarding educating your IRB; unless there is particularly sensitivity to the tweets you are quoting "anonymizing" may in fact be inappropriate. You might want to look at articles like these: Bruckman, Amy. "Studying the amateur artist: A perspective on disguising data collected in human subjects research on the Internet." *Ethics and Information Technology* 4.3 (2002): 217-231. Bruckman, Amy, Kurt Luther, and Casey Fiesler. "When Should We Use Real Names in Published Accounts of Internet Research?." *Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online* (2015): 243. -Jodi http://jodischneider.com/jodi.html On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 8:02 AM, Deen Freelon <dfreelon@gmail.com> wrote:
This could be an opportunity to educate your IRB on social media research, as not all IRBs understand the implications of what they ask researchers to do (I speak from personal experience here). As others have stated, anonymization of Twitter data is both difficult logistically and can impede analysis and presentation of results. At the same time, even with such a public platform, these concerns must be balanced against users' rights and interests. But there are ways other than anonymization to accomplish this.
In our recent report on the Black Lives Matter movement's use of social media, we took three steps to address the privacy and intellectual property concerns of the users whose tweets we cited as examples:
* Posting links to tweets rather than reproducing their full text. * Linking only to tweets that had collected a minimum of 100 retweets. * Linking only to tweets posted by users who had at least 3,000 followers or were Twitter-verified.
We feel these steps helped achieve a balance between our interests as researchers, the audience's interest in understanding the phenomenon, and participants' interests in not having their content appropriated inappropriately. You can read more about these steps on p. 86 of the report, which is available here: http://cmsimpact.org/wp-conten t/uploads/2016/03/beyond_the_hashtags_2016.pdf
/DEEN
On 4/13/2017 11:11 PM, Ye Na Lee wrote:
Dear subscribers to Association of Internet Researchers, I am currently going through IRB process for a research on Twitter data and I was told to anonymize Twitter handles completely. Are there any online programs with which I could anonymize usernames? I don`t think I should create fake Twitter handles for every single tweet that I quote on my paper. I`d really appreciate any suggestions on anonymizing Twitter handles! Thank you in advance! _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Deen Freelon, Ph.D. Associate Professor School of Communication, American University Office: McKinley 325 freelon@american.edu | http://dfreelon.org | @dfreelon < https://twitter.com/dfreelon> New report: Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice <http://www.cmsimpact.org/blmreport>
_______________________________________________ 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/
Thank you Diana, Michael, Maurice, xDxD.vs.xDxD, Bernhard, Shulman, José, Deen, and Jodi for all your helpful feedback. As for some of the concerns that anonymizing Twitter handles will be of no use if I am actually quoting the tweets, I won`t be directly quoting the tweets because I will be translating them from Korean to English and most of the tweets will be presented in aggregated and summarized data sets. I think IRB is taking more precaution because there is a risk of cyberbullying involved in my research. I was going to follow Maurce, Bernhard, and Jose`s advice to hash the Twitter handles on excel and add a "salt" string but I realized that Twitter handles do not constitute identifiable participant information according to IRB standards and thus I won`t need to separate/code identifiers from collected tweets. I will probably refer to Twitter handles as Twitter User A, B, or C or hash the usernames on excel. Thank you all! On Sat, Apr 15, 2017 at 7:05 AM, Jodi Schneider <jschneider@pobox.com> wrote:
I agree with Deen regarding educating your IRB; unless there is particularly sensitivity to the tweets you are quoting "anonymizing" may in fact be inappropriate. You might want to look at articles like these:
Bruckman, Amy. "Studying the amateur artist: A perspective on disguising data collected in human subjects research on the Internet." *Ethics and Information Technology* 4.3 (2002): 217-231.
Bruckman, Amy, Kurt Luther, and Casey Fiesler. "When Should We Use Real Names in Published Accounts of Internet Research?." *Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online* (2015): 243.
-Jodi http://jodischneider.com/jodi.html
On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 8:02 AM, Deen Freelon <dfreelon@gmail.com> wrote:
This could be an opportunity to educate your IRB on social media research, as not all IRBs understand the implications of what they ask researchers to do (I speak from personal experience here). As others have stated, anonymization of Twitter data is both difficult logistically and can impede analysis and presentation of results. At the same time, even with such a public platform, these concerns must be balanced against users' rights and interests. But there are ways other than anonymization to accomplish this.
In our recent report on the Black Lives Matter movement's use of social media, we took three steps to address the privacy and intellectual property concerns of the users whose tweets we cited as examples:
* Posting links to tweets rather than reproducing their full text. * Linking only to tweets that had collected a minimum of 100 retweets. * Linking only to tweets posted by users who had at least 3,000 followers or were Twitter-verified.
We feel these steps helped achieve a balance between our interests as researchers, the audience's interest in understanding the phenomenon, and participants' interests in not having their content appropriated inappropriately. You can read more about these steps on p. 86 of the report, which is available here: http://cmsimpact.org/wp-conten t/uploads/2016/03/beyond_the_hashtags_2016.pdf
/DEEN
On 4/13/2017 11:11 PM, Ye Na Lee wrote:
Dear subscribers to Association of Internet Researchers, I am currently going through IRB process for a research on Twitter data and I was told to anonymize Twitter handles completely. Are there any online programs with which I could anonymize usernames? I don`t think I should create fake Twitter handles for every single tweet that I quote on my paper. I`d really appreciate any suggestions on anonymizing Twitter handles! Thank you in advance! _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Deen Freelon, Ph.D. Associate Professor School of Communication, American University Office: McKinley 325 freelon@american.edu | http://dfreelon.org | @dfreelon < https://twitter.com/dfreelon> New report: Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice <http://www.cmsimpact.org/blmreport>
_______________________________________________ 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/
participants (4)
-
Deen Freelon -
Jodi Schneider -
Michael T Zimmer -
Ye Na Lee