[Air-L] Twitter Data Sharing Update - Thou Shalt Not Share Collections of Tweets

[Alex Halavais]

This seems like an opportune time to ask whether there is ever a time
when violating the Terms of Service is an ethical practice for
researchers. (As a practical issue, clearly Twitter can block access
to particular IP blocks that it finds violating its API ToS, or turn
off the firehose if you are whitelisted.)

The natural response to this for most people is that it is never
ethically permissible to do so. While I recognize that (for example)
this would expose you to personal sanctions from the company for
violating those terms, and potentially expose your institution, I'm
less concerned with the legal implications than I am with ethical
restrictions this places on the researcher.

I think there are cases where violation of a set of Terms is ethically
permissible, a position I took up at an AoIR preconference workshop
last year. This gives us a concrete example. It seems to me that the
tweets themselves are not owned by Twitter, and so they are
restricting your ability to access these materials programmatically,
not to actually having or redistributing the content. If you
"magically" were in possession of a collection of tweets, they would
have little say in their redistribution (though the authors might, an
issue that I think is separate).

Specifically, Twitter prohibits "scraping" the service, but fails to
define this. If I hire a war room to cut and paste tweets, does this
violate the policy? It's simply not clear. It seems to me there is a
kind of Turing-test for scrapers: Twitter would have no way to know
(other than asking) whether I was scraping programmatically or had
hired a room full of undergrads to cut and paste.

I've gotten away from my original question. There's no question that
the courts have thus far sided with ToS as generally being binding.
But when is it (or is it ever) ethically either acceptable or
necessary to violate a web site's Terms?

Best,

Alex




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