[Air-L] Anonymizing Twitter handles

[Maurice Vergeer]

If you do qualitative research and e.g. cite tweets, it's useless to
anonymize (as Michael states). If you do quantitative research the findings
will be so abstract that individual users will be hard to trace, but not
impossible depending on the number of variables and the number of
userhandles.

Still, anonymizing is fairly easy when you have the data in a statistical
program such as SPSS, R or even Excel: replace the userhandles with a
unique number (from 1 to N).
Then remove the userhandles from the dataset. Still I would advice always
to keep a secure file with both keyvariables userhandles and the new
identifyer for future resrearch.

Hope this helps.
Maurice



On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 5:11 AM, Ye Na Lee <jpt2007 at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> Dear subscribers to Association of Internet Researchers,
> I am currently going through IRB process for a research on Twitter data and
> I was told to anonymize Twitter handles completely. Are there any online
> programs with which I could anonymize usernames? I don`t think I should
> create fake Twitter handles for every single tweet that I quote on my
> paper. I`d really appreciate any suggestions on anonymizing Twitter
> handles!
> Thank you in advance!
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