[Air-L] Including screennames with tweets

[Proferes, Nicholas]

Hi Theo,


Respectfully, I think there's a few complications with this line of argument.


1) It appears to give carte blanche for researchers to do whatever they feel like with data because it's "public," and seems to alleviate them of any responsibility. For example, there is a Twitter account which reblogs pictures of debit cards that people have posted to Twitter. This is obviously sensitive information. Might not be ethical for a researcher to repost that content in an unedited fashion. Similarly, we might think of a research paper that focuses on Tweets related to mental health. A researcher might provide examples of tweets, but including a username could create harm. Not because of the tweet content, but because of the assumption/assertion the researcher is making about the individual. My main point here is that harm can still be done when using public data, and researchers should seek to minimize that.


2) Many users do not robustly understand how information flows on Twitter (I've done work in this area: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305117698493). While I understand the point you are making about lacking an expectation of anonymity in a legal sense, I think we need to figure out how to confront the fact that users are not given a lot of tools to understand how their data may be used.


Cheers,

Nick

________________________________
From: Air-L <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Theo Plothe <tp6316a at student.american.edu>
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2018 11:41:45 AM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets

Twitter is a public forum in the public sphere. There is no expectation of
anonymity on speech in that regard. Having published a few pieces on
Twitter including a book chapter just a few weeks ago, I have never failed
to publish the screennames on the se accounts. The only reason not to
include tweets is if the tweets are from a protected account, which is of
course is not part of the public timeline.

Best,
Theo
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