[Air-L] Reddit dataset

[Michael T Zimmer]

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 at uwm.edu
w: www.michaelzimmer.org


> On Jul 3, 2015, at 9:41 PM, Katy Pearce <katycarvt at 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.
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