[Air-L] Research ethics and platform APIs

[Jean Burgess]

Dear colleagues, I’m keen to hear of your experiences with your own research ethics boards/committees, especially in the PCA (Post-Cambridge Analytica) era:


  1.  Have any of you noticed a recent increase in IRBs/ethics committees requiring proof of compliance with social media platforms or apps’ Terms of Service/Terms of Use as part of ethical clearance requirements? Please note I’m not only interested in so-called data-driven methods or API access here, but all kinds of ethnographic, qualitative social research, and critical-interpretative approaches as well.
  2.  If so, are questions of ToS compliance restricted to reasonable questions of harm to participants (for example, your methods may inadvertently induce a participant to share the content of another user, hence violating their own contract with the platform provider)
  3.  Where questions of ToS appear to exceed the bounds of human research ethics considerations (perhaps appearing more concerned with institutional risk avoidance), how have you responded?

Not actually asking for a friend

Jean