[Air-L] Accessing data from closed groups on FB?

Wed Nov 8 00:36:42 PST 2017

Thanks, Jeremy, for this clarification.

I also think it’s worth pointing out that Facebook - and other gigantosaur platforms that many of us have sold our souls to - is allowed to do for commercial purposes what researchers are not allowed to do for scientific purposes. As researchers we have to make sure we minimize harm, and as the ethics discussions at the recent conference in Tartu, maybe even strive to also do good.

We’ve addressed ethical concerns in relation to studying closed groups online using a specific and sensitive case study to discuss these issues in a chapter in the recently published volume "Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Cases and Challenges", edited by Michael Zimmer and Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda:

Hård af Segerstad, Y., Kasperowski, D., Kullenberg, C. & Howes, C. (2017). Studying Closed Communities On-line: Digital Methods and Ethical Considerations beyond Informed Consent and Pseudonymity. In M. Zimmer & K. Kinder-Kurlanda (Eds.), Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Cases and Challenges: Peter Lang. (213-225).

It is available under a Creative commons license and can be found here: https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/82023?format=EPDF

I am indeed a member of the closed group. What we are intending to do in the particular project I was asking for is to invite a number of individual members to participate in a longitudinal study. We’d like to follow their activity in the closed group and possibly also their activity in other groups on FB and on blogs or whatever else they do. This will be accompanied by interviews and maybe also surveys now and then, depending on how many we can recruit and for how long we go on. What I’d like to do is to get the FB-activities for these individuals. And for this, we will be able to get informed consent and active research participation during a longer period of time from these individuals.

As it is no longer possible to scrape data from closed groups using the FB API we’d like to explore the possibility of buying the data for these particular individuals from FB. If we get that data it will definitely also lead to other interesting ethical concerns, re commercial powers' possibilities to override researcher obligations but which may be used by researchers. Which is my hidden agenda to look into, I guess.

So: does anyone know how to go about buying data from Facebook?

Hälsningar

Ylva H
____________________________

Ylva Hård af Segerstad
Docent | Associate Professor
Institutionen för Tillämpad IT | Department of Applied IT
Avdelning Lärande Kommunikation och IT | Divison of Learning Communication and IT
University of Gothenburg
SE-412 56 Gothenburg, Sweden
+46(0)70 3314739 (mobile)
hardy at ait.gu.se<mailto:hardy at ait.gu.se>

8 nov. 2017 kl. 02:08 skrev Jeremy Hunsinger <jeremy at tmttlt.com<mailto:jeremy at tmttlt.com>>:

There are innumerable possible models of research design that would not
require informed consent in this situation.  Informed consent is usually
only required when there is some harm that must be agreed to, but it is
easy to conceive of any number of situations where this data collection
leads to nothing that requires informed consent.  It isn't ethically
anything, until you understand the whole design.  Also remember the ethical
standards are generated from different principles than harm in many
Scandinavian countries as noted in the first set of AoIR guidelines, so
your instincts of informed consent might not be quite fitting.  So let's
not 'throw the baby out with the bathwater' and instead try to answer the
specific question if we can.

--
jeremy hunsinger
Associate Professor
Communication Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University

Collaboratory for Digital Discourse and Culture
Virginia Tech
www.tmttlt.com<http://www.tmttlt.com>

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