[Air-L] Anonymizing Twitter handles

[xDxD.vs.xDxD]

Hello

there are also other things to keep in mind: for both ethical and legal
purposes.

For example there is the notion of geographic singularities:

If in a certain geographical area there are only one, or a few, points (for
example geo referenced tweets or instagram posts) it could be fairly easy
to identify them even if their nicknames had been anonymized.

In this case further levels of anonymization would be needed. (or even
getting rid of the items)

In any case: there is a wealth of cases in which the content alone, or its
context, make it easy to identify the subject, even if anonymized. These
require more complex actions to preserve people's rights.

cheers!
Salvatore


ᐧ

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 8:47 AM, Maurice Vergeer <m.vergeer at maw.ru.nl>
wrote:

> 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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>
>
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