[Air-L] Ethical problem in a Twitter reaserch

Mon Dec 18 07:48:30 PST 2017

Hi Lior,

Are you planning on publishing individual tweets verbatim? You mentioned discourse analysis and of course giving some examples of the data is helpful for the reader. However, I’d imagine by having a discussion in your methods section about the hashtag you are working with and stating the reasons why you withdraw from re-purposing those tweets and re-publishing them in another platform, you may still run your analysis.

I work with Instagram photos of children and make sure I include photos with no face in my text. With visual narratives, that’s possible because, thankfully, body posture recognition is not yet on the book. Of course, you cannot blur any words in a tweet or any verbal narrative. I may be wrong to say this but quoting tweets verbatim is problematic not only for minors but for ALL people. What do everyone think?

Ayşenur

---------------------------------------------------
Ayşenur Benevento

Ph.D. Candidate in Developmental Psychology
The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Research Associate with Children’s Environment Research Group<http://cergnyc.org/>

www.aysenurataman.com<http://www.aysenurataman.com>

On Dec 18, 2017, at 5:48 AM, Stuart Shulman <stuart.shulman at gmail.com<mailto:stuart.shulman at gmail.com>> wrote:

The central issue is the absence of any verifiable age data on Twitter.
With the exception of "verified" accounts, where the verified user has a
known public birthdate listed somewhere other than Twitter, there is no age
data. Any account could be underage. No doubt there are minors "passing"
for adults and the opposite as well.

So, how would we know?

You could go by the Twitter user description, which is a self-assigned
brief biography that sometimes includes social demographic information
(ex., high school athlete, states ones age directly, the photograph, etc.)
but none of that is verified. You could cross-check user by user against
other public information. For example, my son is @liamcs10 on Twitter. He
is 15. If you Google his name you can verify he is a minor because he plays
on a U17 soccer club and his current roster picture is online.

At the level of the ethnographic research, you could do this time-consuming
forensic work, but it would only work in some cases, not all, and would
never scale up to the type of research many are doing with Twitter data.

So you have a problem. If you need to assure an IRB or other research
supervisory board there are no children in your Twitter data: it cannot
really be done.

Stu

Stu Shulman <https://twitter.com/StuartWShulman>MA Olympic Development
Program (ODP), Assistant Coach
Region I ODP, 2005 Boys ID Camp Staff Coach
NEFC-West 2008 Boys, Head Coach

On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 5:07 AM, Cormac O'Keeffe <okeeffe.cormac at gmail.com<mailto:okeeffe.cormac at gmail.com>>
wrote:

That's a really good pint Sonia. Thanks!

On Mon, 18 Dec 2017 at 10:59, Charles M. Ess <c.m.ess at media.uio.no<mailto:c.m.ess at media.uio.no>> wrote:

perfect - thanks for the most helpful clarification, Sonia!
- c.

On 18/12/17 10:35, Livingstone,S wrote:
Children cannot legally consent to use of their personal data,
precisely
because they are children. Hence in the US COPPA applies, and in Europe
the
General Data Protection Regulation., both of which require verifiable
parental consent for the use of children's personal data. Much depends on
the legal definition of personal data, of course.

I would also urge a child-rights approach to research ethics. For
instance, contrary to what many researchers believe, and contrary to
companies' T&C, in my research children have told me that they consider
Facebook to be public and Twitter to be privacy (cf Nissenbaum's
contextual
integrity).  So my understanding is that this is incorrect below, and
that
much social media research is improper....

Best, Sonia

-----Original Message-----
From: Air-L [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of
Charles M. Ess
Sent: 18 December 2017 08:58
To: Lior Beserman <liorbeserman at gmail.com<mailto:liorbeserman at gmail.com>>; air-l at listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Subject: Re: [Air-L] Ethical problem in a Twitter reaserch

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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