[Air-L] Reddit dataset

[Alex Halavais]

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 at 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 at 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 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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-- 

// Alexander Halavais, Sociologist, Semiologist, and Saboteur Extraordinaire
// Associate Professor of Social Technologies, Arizona State University
// http://alex.halavais.net/bio     @halavais