[Request for Input] Research Practices for Closed Messaging Groups
Dear all, Hope everyone and your loved ones are doing well. As part of a project connected to MisinfoCon <http://misinfocon.com/> and The Carter Center <http://cartercenter.org/>, and also in conversation with the Secretariat at the Forum on Information and Democracy <https://rsf.org/en/news/eleven-organizations-civil-society-create-forum-information-democracy-structural-response>, I have been overseeing a landscape review of current practices related to researchers entering into closed messaging spaces (e.g. WhatsApp, Telegram). This landscape review is intended to inform a set of recommended practices related to closed messaging spaces to be developed in conversation among human rights practitioners, election observers, and fact-checking projects. We are seeking protocols and examples of research practices mentioned in papers, in addition to how these efforts define privacy and public discourse; the particular backdrop has been elections but can be broader. Examples of issues that we are focusing on: * how the study defines *public* and *private* * whether the size of the group matters and how * whether and how the researchers identified themselves * what protocols have been defined related to de-identification of participants, limitation of content collected, and the storage around the datasets * whether the study protocol has been reviewed by an IRB or other external organization Should you have recommendations of papers and reports to include, I would love to hear about them here or off-thread. If you are interested also in participating in the effort overall, please feel free to reach me off-thread as well. Best, Connie -- connie moon sehat connieimdialog@gmail.com https://linkedin.com/in/connieatwork PGP Key ID: 0x95DFB60E
Hi, I am a postdoc at MIT and one of my primary projects here is based on analyzing large amount of data we got from public groups discussing politics in India. We do not have any work published yet, but I've been in this space for over a year now and have been thinking about similar questions. I was the authors of one of the papers to developed tools to collect data from public whatsapp groups. https://users.ics.aalto.fi/kiran/content/whatsapp.pdf There we defined public groups as groups which had a link to join publicly available. During the recent elections in India, we used the same methodology to collect data from thousands of public groups discussing politics. We did not explicitly declare our presence in these groups. However, our WhatsApp account clearly mentioned that we are a research institution and collecting this data for research. We have IRB from MIT for our research. We take extra care in storing personally identifiable information. We store the anonmyized message data separately from the personal information and do not share any information unless aggregated. Similar attempts to monitor public groups have been done elsewhere, e.g. at Oxford: https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/india-election-memo/ where they explicitly declared their presence in the group once they joined them. and Columbia https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/india-whatsapp-analysis-election-security.php where they did not monitor groups with less than 60 users. There have been other works in Brazil http://www.dcc.ufmg.br/~fabricio/download/resende-www2019.pdf but I do not think the authors declared their presence. Other work I am aware of is from people at Meedan (Scott Hale) and FirstDraft (Claire Wardle) who have been trying to use data from fact checking tiplines on WhatsApp that were set up to collect data during the elections in Brazil and India. This is a different model to the 'public' data collection above as it is opt in. On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 11:35 AM connie im dialog <connieimdialog@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear all, Hope everyone and your loved ones are doing well.
As part of a project connected to MisinfoCon <http://misinfocon.com/> and The Carter Center <http://cartercenter.org/>, and also in conversation with the Secretariat at the Forum on Information and Democracy < https://rsf.org/en/news/eleven-organizations-civil-society-create-forum-info...
, I have been overseeing a landscape review of current practices related to researchers entering into closed messaging spaces (e.g. WhatsApp, Telegram). This landscape review is intended to inform a set of recommended practices related to closed messaging spaces to be developed in conversation among human rights practitioners, election observers, and fact-checking projects.
We are seeking protocols and examples of research practices mentioned in papers, in addition to how these efforts define privacy and public discourse; the particular backdrop has been elections but can be broader. Examples of issues that we are focusing on:
* how the study defines *public* and *private* * whether the size of the group matters and how * whether and how the researchers identified themselves * what protocols have been defined related to de-identification of participants, limitation of content collected, and the storage around the datasets * whether the study protocol has been reviewed by an IRB or other external organization
Should you have recommendations of papers and reports to include, I would love to hear about them here or off-thread. If you are interested also in participating in the effort overall, please feel free to reach me off-thread as well.
Best, Connie
-- connie moon sehat connieimdialog@gmail.com https://linkedin.com/in/connieatwork PGP Key ID: 0x95DFB60E _______________________________________________ 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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-- -- Kiran
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connie im dialog -
kiran gvr