[Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
Casey Lynn Fiesler
Casey.Fiesler at Colorado.EDU
Fri Jul 13 09:07:54 PDT 2018
Nick already mentioned out recent research about this, but I’ll just chime in and add a few thoughts:
It hasn’t come up at all what the subject matter of the papers/books are. I think that this is really relevant to an ethical analysis of this situation, because it goes to potential harm. There’s a big difference between “here is a tweet from someone talking about what they had for breakfast” and “here is a tweet from someone showing signs of a mental illness” or “here is a tweet from a political dissident who might be in physical danger”. Whether or not online content is PUBLIC is an important contextual factor (because of course if it’s not public, that’s a problem), but in my opinion should not be the only thing relevant for this decision.
Though it’s also worth pointing out that if the tweet is something that could actually lead to harm, the issue isn’t publishing the handle or not - because public tweets can be easily searched. In that case, it might be better not to quote a tweet verbatim, or to use composites.
As Tarleton says, the issue is whether a certain use is required to describe the work, which goes to a cost/benefit analysis. If it’s a tweet about breakfast that should be a different analysis than a tweet about a health condition. For the latter, you might want a more compelling reason for why the tweet needs to be there.
The account name issue is even more tricky because depending on the context, it is possible there could be harm by not giving someone CREDIT for their content. But unless that kind of thing is likely - given what Nick and I found, unless there’s a reason that a handle has explanatory value it seems to just add another layer of potential discomfort for the unknowing research participants.
That said, there are different norms in different communities about this kind of thing. What I’d like most to see is ethical analyses beyond “is it public or not” and for those analyses to be surfaced in the writing. So regardless of decisions, explaining them as part of methods would be great!
Casey
> On Jul 13, 2018, at 9:27 AM, Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>
> Out of curiosity, I scanned through Twitter's ToS and related policies; I didn't see anything indicating how they want a tweet to be cited. Maybe it did in earlier versions, or I just missed it. But even so, it's not clear how Twitter's ToS has any standing or relevance to what a researcher does, as they're not the person contracting with Twitter in that contract. We could take their advice in to account, but I think Nick and Casey's point is the right one. What's the added value to the research of including the person's Twitter handle in the publication, such that it overcomes the possible discomfort and possible harm it could bring? It's surprising to me how often adding the handle / the name of the speaker / the interviewee really doesn't add to the analysis -- that we may be doing it more because it's what journalists do, or because we want to perform that it’s a legit tweet, or out of habit. Our instinct should not be how much can I publish based on what rights I think people have given up, but how far can I go to protect people and still make the cogent analysis the discussion requires.
>
> Tarleton
>
>
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>
>
>
>
> On 7/13/18, 11:17 AM, "Air-L on behalf of Proferes, Nicholas" <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org on behalf of nproferes at uky.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
>
> Casey Fiesler and I recently published an article on Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366).
>
>
> One of our findings from the study was that when we asked, "How would you feel if a Tweet of yours was used in a research study and your Tweet was quoted in a published research paper, attributed to your Twitter handle?" only about ~24% of respondents indicated that they would be comfortable with this.
>
>
> There's obviously a lot of situations in which including Twitter handles is appropriate (quoting public figures seems like a pretty clear cut case), but I do think it might be worth taking user expectations into consideration in that contextual decision, particularly if you are working with populations subject to harassment/bullying.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Nick
>
> ________________________________
> From: Air-L <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Judith Rosenbaum-Andre <judith.rosenbaumandre at maine.edu>
> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 6:45:06 AM
> To: daniel.thomas--airl at cl.cam.ac.uk
> Cc: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
>
> I just recently published a book on Twitter, race, and gender, and my
> publisher was very insistent I did use people's Twitter handles. For
> clarification, I used all publicly available tweets. I went back and forth
> on it myself a few times (and still every once in a while wake up in the
> middle of the night thinking, "did I do the right thing?!"), but ended up
> agreeing with them. Their argument, per Twitter's ToS, was that people's
> tweets should be treated as you would an in-text citation (e.g., "Hayes
> said"), as they are their thoughts and ideas, expressed in a public forum,
> and thus they have earned the right to be credited for them (almost on a
> par with copyright). Because I used public tweets anyone could and can
> still find the tweets even if I hadn't listed the screen name, which
> renders the argument that we need to protect their identity somewhat moot.
> In my book, I discuss some pretty awful statements though, and I did make
> sure to not choose tweets as examples that could really get people into
> trouble with their employer, for instance, and would instead use more
> innocuous tweets to illustrate my point. This kind of research, because I
> use public tweets, falls outside of our IRB's scope, as they consider it
> public information on a par with analyzing media content and thus
> non-human-subjects research.
> I don't know if this helps at all - I think it's a tough issue to deal
> with, and both decisions, like you said, have their pros and cons.
>
> On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 4:27 AM Daniel Thomas <
> daniel.thomas--airl at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Dear Becky,
>>
>> My understanding, though I haven't been involved in Twitter research
>> myself, is that academics in the US have mostly decided it is fine to
>> include screennames and that academics in the UK have mostly decided it
>> is not OK to include screennames. I think that Twitter ToS require the
>> sceennames to be included and allow publication as long as the full
>> tweet is published (including sceenname). However, publishing without
>> the sceenname is not permitted (this is second hand information so I may
>> be wrong). The other issue is that even if sceennames are not included
>> then it is easy to find the author from the content of the tweet and so
>> the authors are still trivially deanonymised. Minor tweaks to
>> punctuation/wording are apparently also insufficient as Twitter's search
>> function will still normally find the original tweet.
>> Depending on the research method you are using it may be possible to
>> write your own synthesised example tweets that are representative of the
>> kind of things people say. However, I know that for some methods/fields
>> that is not possible.
>>
>> I think it is a question where you will want your Research Ethics
>> Board/IRB to sign off on your answer.
>>
>> Helena Webb <helena.webb at cs.ox.ac.uk> from the University of Oxford
>> might be a good person to talk to about this because she uses a similar
>> Twitter example in her research ethics case studies at the workshops she
>> runs. She did research that she was not able to publish because she ran
>> into this problem and was not able to find a solution that protected the
>> tweeters and was publishable.
>>
>> Daniel
>>
>> On 13/07/18 07:23, Hayes, Rebecca M wrote:
>>> Dear All,
>>> Can you please weigh in on the decision to include or not include
>> screennames
>>> when we cite tweets in a book? The book is on new media and crime,
>>> and we are using tweets in a few places as examples of some different
>> discussions.
>>>
>>> We are back and forth on whether we should include the screennames and
>> at others or disclude them. The arguments we have seen thus far, are to
>> include them because it was made public and we are citing someones words.
>> The other argument is to disclude them
>>> as the person did not consent to have it printed in that way persay, and
>> the screenname attached in our book could be used to find and harass the
>> person. What are your thoughts?
>>>
>>> Thank you,
>>> Becky
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>
> --
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