Someone posted a link to a dataset of Reddit posts to the AOIR Facebook page. I wonder what the AOIR community members feel about this in terms of this being "public" data.
I saw that, but has it since been deleted by the OP? I can’t seem to find it, nor the thread on Reddit. IIRC, a Redditor used the site’s API to grab all comments ever posted to the site, but it wasn’t clear if this included subreddits that are set as “private.” In the Facebook post, the OP appeared to cast aside concerns over consent since the data was “public”. While I’d agree the data is public in the sense that anyone could access it (if they had the URLs, search capabilities, time, etc to do so), this calculus is much too simplistic and ignores the contextual nature of those comments. As another commenter on the FB thread (was that you, Katy? I can’t remember) noted, just because someone posted a comment to Reddit doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily consented to having that data included in a research study. Plus, as the commenter noted, there likely are minors in the dataset, which complicates consent. This relates closely to what I discuss in my article "'But the data is already public': on the ethics of research in Facebook”, and others have covered as well, especially in the AoIR Ethics Guidelines: http://ethics.aoir.org/ Michael -- Michael Zimmer, PhD Associate Professor, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org
On Jul 3, 2015, at 9:41 PM, Katy Pearce <katycarvt@gmail.com> wrote:
Someone posted a link to a dataset of Reddit posts to the AOIR Facebook page. I wonder what the AOIR community members feel about this in terms of this being "public" data. _______________________________________________ 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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Just to give more context, the reddit API cannot scrape 'private' subreddits. So yes, it is entirely public data. That said, I think there are some social data issues to consider, such as persistence and issues of access, but technically those issues exist through reddit's search functionality (and actually play an important role in accountability on the platform for individuals). --- Alexander Leavitt PhD Candidate USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt <http://twitter.com/alexleavitt> On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 5:31 AM, Michael T Zimmer <zimmerm@uwm.edu> wrote:
I saw that, but has it since been deleted by the OP? I can’t seem to find it, nor the thread on Reddit.
IIRC, a Redditor used the site’s API to grab all comments ever posted to the site, but it wasn’t clear if this included subreddits that are set as “private.”
In the Facebook post, the OP appeared to cast aside concerns over consent since the data was “public”. While I’d agree the data is public in the sense that anyone could access it (if they had the URLs, search capabilities, time, etc to do so), this calculus is much too simplistic and ignores the contextual nature of those comments. As another commenter on the FB thread (was that you, Katy? I can’t remember) noted, just because someone posted a comment to Reddit doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily consented to having that data included in a research study. Plus, as the commenter noted, there likely are minors in the dataset, which complicates consent.
This relates closely to what I discuss in my article "'But the data is already public': on the ethics of research in Facebook”, and others have covered as well, especially in the AoIR Ethics Guidelines: http://ethics.aoir.org/
Michael
-- Michael Zimmer, PhD Associate Professor, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org
On Jul 3, 2015, at 9:41 PM, Katy Pearce <katycarvt@gmail.com> wrote:
Someone posted a link to a dataset of Reddit posts to the AOIR Facebook page. I wonder what the AOIR community members feel about this in terms of this being "public" data. _______________________________________________ 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/
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I think it's worth considering the context of the comments and taking steps to reduce harm. I also think that when you do things in public fora, you are subjecting yourself to the possibility of becoming someone's research subject. While it's important to consider harm in the process, it is also not essential to obtain consent of those who posted. I've used Reddit data. The only time I requested consent was for direct quotations, since it could be easily traced back to the original commenters. For aggregated analysis, I think that requesting such permission is both onerous and unnecessary, and greater collective damage is caused by the research that might be left undone because of unnecessarily strict drawing of privacy lines. - Alex On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 10:51 AM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com> wrote:
Just to give more context, the reddit API cannot scrape 'private' subreddits. So yes, it is entirely public data. That said, I think there are some social data issues to consider, such as persistence and issues of access, but technically those issues exist through reddit's search functionality (and actually play an important role in accountability on the platform for individuals).
---
Alexander Leavitt PhD Candidate USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt <http://twitter.com/alexleavitt>
On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 5:31 AM, Michael T Zimmer <zimmerm@uwm.edu> wrote:
I saw that, but has it since been deleted by the OP? I can’t seem to find it, nor the thread on Reddit.
IIRC, a Redditor used the site’s API to grab all comments ever posted to the site, but it wasn’t clear if this included subreddits that are set as “private.”
In the Facebook post, the OP appeared to cast aside concerns over consent since the data was “public”. While I’d agree the data is public in the sense that anyone could access it (if they had the URLs, search capabilities, time, etc to do so), this calculus is much too simplistic and ignores the contextual nature of those comments. As another commenter on the FB thread (was that you, Katy? I can’t remember) noted, just because someone posted a comment to Reddit doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily consented to having that data included in a research study. Plus, as the commenter noted, there likely are minors in the dataset, which complicates consent.
This relates closely to what I discuss in my article "'But the data is already public': on the ethics of research in Facebook”, and others have covered as well, especially in the AoIR Ethics Guidelines: http://ethics.aoir.org/
Michael
-- Michael Zimmer, PhD Associate Professor, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org
On Jul 3, 2015, at 9:41 PM, Katy Pearce <katycarvt@gmail.com> wrote:
Someone posted a link to a dataset of Reddit posts to the AOIR Facebook page. I wonder what the AOIR community members feel about this in terms of this being "public" data. _______________________________________________ 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/
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-- // Alexander Halavais, Sociologist, Semiologist, and Saboteur Extraordinaire // Associate Professor of Social Technologies, Arizona State University // http://alex.halavais.net/bio @halavais
Yeah, I’d probably agree with such an approach (which is the more nuanced thinking I’d hope for, rather than just an automatic “public=always ok”). -- Michael Zimmer, PhD Associate Professor, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org
On Jul 4, 2015, at 2:25 PM, Alex Halavais <alex@halavais.net> wrote:
I think it's worth considering the context of the comments and taking steps to reduce harm. I also think that when you do things in public fora, you are subjecting yourself to the possibility of becoming someone's research subject. While it's important to consider harm in the process, it is also not essential to obtain consent of those who posted.
I've used Reddit data. The only time I requested consent was for direct quotations, since it could be easily traced back to the original commenters. For aggregated analysis, I think that requesting such permission is both onerous and unnecessary, and greater collective damage is caused by the research that might be left undone because of unnecessarily strict drawing of privacy lines.
- Alex
On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 10:51 AM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com> wrote:
Just to give more context, the reddit API cannot scrape 'private' subreddits. So yes, it is entirely public data. That said, I think there are some social data issues to consider, such as persistence and issues of access, but technically those issues exist through reddit's search functionality (and actually play an important role in accountability on the platform for individuals).
---
Alexander Leavitt PhD Candidate USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt <http://twitter.com/alexleavitt>
On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 5:31 AM, Michael T Zimmer <zimmerm@uwm.edu> wrote:
I saw that, but has it since been deleted by the OP? I can’t seem to find it, nor the thread on Reddit.
IIRC, a Redditor used the site’s API to grab all comments ever posted to the site, but it wasn’t clear if this included subreddits that are set as “private.”
In the Facebook post, the OP appeared to cast aside concerns over consent since the data was “public”. While I’d agree the data is public in the sense that anyone could access it (if they had the URLs, search capabilities, time, etc to do so), this calculus is much too simplistic and ignores the contextual nature of those comments. As another commenter on the FB thread (was that you, Katy? I can’t remember) noted, just because someone posted a comment to Reddit doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily consented to having that data included in a research study. Plus, as the commenter noted, there likely are minors in the dataset, which complicates consent.
This relates closely to what I discuss in my article "'But the data is already public': on the ethics of research in Facebook”, and others have covered as well, especially in the AoIR Ethics Guidelines: http://ethics.aoir.org/
Michael
-- Michael Zimmer, PhD Associate Professor, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org
On Jul 3, 2015, at 9:41 PM, Katy Pearce <katycarvt@gmail.com> wrote:
Someone posted a link to a dataset of Reddit posts to the AOIR Facebook page. I wonder what the AOIR community members feel about this in terms of this being "public" data. _______________________________________________ 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/
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Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
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--
// Alexander Halavais, Sociologist, Semiologist, and Saboteur Extraordinaire // Associate Professor of Social Technologies, Arizona State University // http://alex.halavais.net/bio @halavais
It's fun to think about -- and shows our biases, and how they change over time. I would have argued a decade-plus ago that you should send all such work dealing with online fora through human subjects for review anyway, but given the upswing in the number of people who are supposedly-competent users of the internet and understand that words, online, are more permanent than we might like... I might argue, nowadays, that we can be far too cautious and that burdening the local office of human subjects with full-review on anything dealing with public text is... a burden on them. ;-) I really like Alex's approach of always asking explicit permission before republishing verbatim quotes. Search engines, indeed, find those things - and accidentally doxxing someone over controversial words is not something to relish. Most of the human subjects folk have surely figured out how to deal with expedited review of internet related work, by now... I hope. ;-) --e On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 7:12 PM, Michael T Zimmer <zimmerm@uwm.edu> wrote:
Yeah, I’d probably agree with such an approach (which is the more nuanced thinking I’d hope for, rather than just an automatic “public=always ok”).
-- Michael Zimmer, PhD Associate Professor, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org
On Jul 4, 2015, at 2:25 PM, Alex Halavais <alex@halavais.net> wrote:
I think it's worth considering the context of the comments and taking steps to reduce harm. I also think that when you do things in public fora, you are subjecting yourself to the possibility of becoming someone's research subject. While it's important to consider harm in the process, it is also not essential to obtain consent of those who posted.
I've used Reddit data. The only time I requested consent was for direct quotations, since it could be easily traced back to the original commenters. For aggregated analysis, I think that requesting such permission is both onerous and unnecessary, and greater collective damage is caused by the research that might be left undone because of unnecessarily strict drawing of privacy lines.
- Alex
On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 10:51 AM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com> wrote:
Just to give more context, the reddit API cannot scrape 'private' subreddits. So yes, it is entirely public data. That said, I think there are some social data issues to consider, such as persistence and issues of access, but technically those issues exist through reddit's search functionality (and actually play an important role in accountability on the platform for individuals).
---
Alexander Leavitt PhD Candidate USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt <http://twitter.com/alexleavitt>
On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 5:31 AM, Michael T Zimmer <zimmerm@uwm.edu> wrote:
I saw that, but has it since been deleted by the OP? I can’t seem to find it, nor the thread on Reddit.
IIRC, a Redditor used the site’s API to grab all comments ever posted to the site, but it wasn’t clear if this included subreddits that are set as “private.”
In the Facebook post, the OP appeared to cast aside concerns over consent since the data was “public”. While I’d agree the data is public in the sense that anyone could access it (if they had the URLs, search capabilities, time, etc to do so), this calculus is much too simplistic and ignores the contextual nature of those comments. As another commenter on the FB thread (was that you, Katy? I can’t remember) noted, just because someone posted a comment to Reddit doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily consented to having that data included in a research study. Plus, as the commenter noted, there likely are minors in the dataset, which complicates consent.
This relates closely to what I discuss in my article "'But the data is already public': on the ethics of research in Facebook”, and others have covered as well, especially in the AoIR Ethics Guidelines: http://ethics.aoir.org/
Michael
-- Michael Zimmer, PhD Associate Professor, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org
On Jul 3, 2015, at 9:41 PM, Katy Pearce <katycarvt@gmail.com> wrote:
Someone posted a link to a dataset of Reddit posts to the AOIR Facebook page. I wonder what the AOIR community members feel about this in terms of this being "public" data. _______________________________________________ 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/
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--
// Alexander Halavais, Sociologist, Semiologist, and Saboteur Extraordinaire // Associate Professor of Social Technologies, Arizona State University // http://alex.halavais.net/bio @halavais
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I think in large survey work consent to be researched is needed. Quality and trust increase with knowing consent and assured privacy. I wonder if there are any pollsters in the list who would comment. This is how we argue at my day job which does not collect internet data and subjects are often legally required to participate. I am adding this perspective here to show another end of the spectrum. I would be interested in comparing this debate to collection standards in medical research like drug trials or addictions treatment outcome research as I know that area a bit. I also realize findings may be less interesting on a subject unit basis from a telephone interview or paper questionnaire compared to what one can find online. Peter Timusk peterotimusk@gmail.com I do not speak for my employer or charities or political parties or unions I volunteer with or belong to, unless otherwise noted.
On Jul 4, 2015, at 3:25 PM, Alex Halavais <alex@halavais.net> wrote:
I think it's worth considering the context of the comments and taking steps to reduce harm. I also think that when you do things in public fora, you are subjecting yourself to the possibility of becoming someone's research subject. While it's important to consider harm in the process, it is also not essential to obtain consent of those who posted.
I've used Reddit data. The only time I requested consent was for direct quotations, since it could be easily traced back to the original commenters. For aggregated analysis, I think that requesting such permission is both onerous and unnecessary, and greater collective damage is caused by the research that might be left undone because of unnecessarily strict drawing of privacy lines.
- Alex
On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 10:51 AM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt@gmail.com> wrote: Just to give more context, the reddit API cannot scrape 'private' subreddits. So yes, it is entirely public data. That said, I think there are some social data issues to consider, such as persistence and issues of access, but technically those issues exist through reddit's search functionality (and actually play an important role in accountability on the platform for individuals).
---
Alexander Leavitt PhD Candidate USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt <http://twitter.com/alexleavitt>
On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 5:31 AM, Michael T Zimmer <zimmerm@uwm.edu> wrote:
I saw that, but has it since been deleted by the OP? I can’t seem to find it, nor the thread on Reddit.
IIRC, a Redditor used the site’s API to grab all comments ever posted to the site, but it wasn’t clear if this included subreddits that are set as “private.”
In the Facebook post, the OP appeared to cast aside concerns over consent since the data was “public”. While I’d agree the data is public in the sense that anyone could access it (if they had the URLs, search capabilities, time, etc to do so), this calculus is much too simplistic and ignores the contextual nature of those comments. As another commenter on the FB thread (was that you, Katy? I can’t remember) noted, just because someone posted a comment to Reddit doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily consented to having that data included in a research study. Plus, as the commenter noted, there likely are minors in the dataset, which complicates consent.
This relates closely to what I discuss in my article "'But the data is already public': on the ethics of research in Facebook”, and others have covered as well, especially in the AoIR Ethics Guidelines: http://ethics.aoir.org/
Michael
-- Michael Zimmer, PhD Associate Professor, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org
On Jul 3, 2015, at 9:41 PM, Katy Pearce <katycarvt@gmail.com> wrote:
Someone posted a link to a dataset of Reddit posts to the AOIR Facebook page. I wonder what the AOIR community members feel about this in terms of this being "public" data. _______________________________________________ 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/
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--
// Alexander Halavais, Sociologist, Semiologist, and Saboteur Extraordinaire // Associate Professor of Social Technologies, Arizona State University // http://alex.halavais.net/bio @halavais
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participants (6)
-
Alex Halavais -
Alex Leavitt -
Elijah Wright -
Katy Pearce -
Michael T Zimmer -
Peter Timusk