[Air-L] Anonymizing Twitter handles

[Jodi Schneider]

I agree with Deen regarding educating your IRB; unless there is
particularly sensitivity to the tweets you are quoting "anonymizing" may in
fact be inappropriate. You might want to look at articles like these:

Bruckman, Amy. "Studying the amateur artist: A perspective on disguising
data collected in human subjects research on the Internet." *Ethics and
Information Technology* 4.3 (2002): 217-231.

Bruckman, Amy, Kurt Luther, and Casey Fiesler. "When Should We Use Real
Names in Published Accounts of Internet Research?." *Digital Research
Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online* (2015): 243.

-Jodi
http://jodischneider.com/jodi.html

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 8:02 AM, Deen Freelon <dfreelon at gmail.com> wrote:

> This could be an opportunity to educate your IRB on social media research,
> as not all IRBs understand the implications of what they ask researchers to
> do (I speak from personal experience here). As others have stated,
> anonymization of Twitter data is both difficult logistically and can impede
> analysis and presentation of results. At the same time, even with such a
> public platform, these concerns must be balanced against users' rights and
> interests. But there are ways other than anonymization to accomplish this.
>
> In our recent report on the Black Lives Matter movement's use of social
> media, we took three steps to address the privacy and intellectual property
> concerns of the users whose tweets we cited as examples:
>
>  * Posting links to tweets rather than reproducing their full text.
>  * Linking only to tweets that had collected a minimum of 100 retweets.
>  * Linking only to tweets posted by users who had at least 3,000
>    followers or were Twitter-verified.
>
> We feel these steps helped achieve a balance between our interests as
> researchers, the audience's interest in understanding the phenomenon, and
> participants' interests in not having their content appropriated
> inappropriately. You can read more about these steps on p. 86 of the
> report, which is available here: http://cmsimpact.org/wp-conten
> t/uploads/2016/03/beyond_the_hashtags_2016.pdf
>
> /DEEN
>
>
> On 4/13/2017 11:11 PM, Ye Na Lee 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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>
> --
> Deen Freelon, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor
> School of Communication, American University
> Office: McKinley 325
> freelon at american.edu | http://dfreelon.org | @dfreelon <
> https://twitter.com/dfreelon>
> New report: Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the
> Online Struggle for Offline Justice <http://www.cmsimpact.org/blmreport>
>
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