[Air-L] Ethical problem in a Twitter reaserch

[Charles M. Ess]

Hi,

one fairly standard approach is to go ahead and conduct your research - 
though probably with the additional step of setting up a second database 
that assigns random identifiers to the original accounts / profiles.

Once you have completed your analyses - then the question becomes what 
you need to include as explicit quotes in the publication / 
dissemination phase.  Typically, these are only a few - i.e., in 
contrast with 10s if not 100s of thousands (if not more) of texts 
gathered in.
Whereas informed consent is impossible for the latter - it is 
considerably more feasible for the former.  So one possibility is to 
contact the writers you want to quote and ask for their permission.

Of course, this will not directly address the question as to whether 
they are minors - and you're exactly right that this is a critical 
ethical (and, in many jurisdictions, a legal) issue.

At this point, some will argue that this is not your problem - the 
informants have read (well, at least clicked through) the ToS and that 
such posts are by a kind of default public and so don't require anything 
more than acknowledgement (copyright to the author).  If a minor is 
involved, on this view, ethical obligations to vulnerable populations 
are overridden by a kind of legal coverage ostensibly provided by their 
agreeing to the ToS.

Others - especially from deontological and ethics of care perspectives - 
will argue that protection of minors overrides any legal contract 
established in the ToS.  How you directly ascertain the identity of 
someone on Twitter while asking for their permission to use their quote 
is, of course, not unproblematic.  But these days, it's harder to be a 
dog unnoticed as a dog on the Internet and so it might be more 
straightforward than say 10 or certainly 20 years ago.

My 2 cents - good luck and looking forward to the discussion!

- charles

On 18/12/17 07:46, Lior Beserman wrote:
> Dear  Air-L Community,
> 
> I have encountered an ethical problem which I am sure I am not the first to
> encounter and so would appreciate your say on the matter.
> I am doing a discourse analysis on a twitter hashtag and I have no way to
> discern that I am not using under age (under 18) users tweets.
> As there are completely different questions and guidelines to research
> minors from an ethical perspective, I was wondering how other people have
> dealt with this problem in their research?
> 
> Thank you,
> Lior Beserman Navon,
> 
> Ph.D. Candidate
> 
> The Department of Sociology & Anthropology
> 
> The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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-- 
Professor in Media Studies
Department of Media and Communication
University of Oslo
<http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html>

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Oslo, Norway
c.m.ess at media.uio.no