[Air-L] Including screennames with tweets

Fri Jul 13 12:32:28 PDT 2018

This is a great discussion, and I’m glad to be part of it. It occurs to me that the fact people on this list in particular don’t have a hard and fast answers demonstrates what a tricky issue this is. I don’t have the answer either, but for what its worth I can share my own approach and thoughts.

I’ve collected from Twitter and other social media channels for a project dating back to 2013. The tweets in my particularly instance are volunteered to a specific, unique hashtag (#harkive), rather than harvested from keywords. Even so, I’ve taken the decision not to use usernames in articles/chapters/presentations. I provide a way via my project website for people to have their data permanently removed but, as I guess we all know, anyone who enters the text of a tweet into Google will almost certainly be able to find the original author if they want to. Once a tweet and/or a username is printed in a physical book, or a PDF made available online, then I would see that as beyond my control - in other words, removing a tweet from my database would not remove it from the copies in circulation. My feeling is that excluding usernames mitigates potential risks somewhat, but it doesn’t remove those risks entirely. If I were working with data harvested from keywords - and if consent had not been given - then I would have misgivings about both verbatim quotes and usernames, and certainly if the subject matter of the tweets and/or article had any obvious potential to cause harm.

Kind regards
Craig
> On 13 Jul 2018, at 19:13, Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> 
> I think someone who administers IRB would disagree. Even if we take tweets to be public statements, and even if we the users in this case fully understood them as public, there are different values to think about. As researchers, our obligation is to recognize that including people in our work, however valuable to the research, can come at a cost for the people made into subjects of that research; part of the commitment to being a researcher then means respecting people's autonomy and treating them ethically, "not only by respecting their decisions and protecting them from harm, but also by making efforts to secure their well-being" (http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/EP/EP713_ResearchEthics/EP713_ResearchEthics3.html) Instead of "If you choose to exclude, you will have to explain why" I think IRB principles would say it’s the reverse: if you're including the identity of your research subjects, you will have to explain why -- and probably to them.
> 
> Paula, by the end your comment seems to imply that what's at issue is whether to quote the tweet itself ("very risky"), but I think all that is being discussed here is identifying its author. I totally have the gut instinct to want to credit people, it's deeply ingrained in how we work. But the tweets in this case are not secondary sources of scholarship, they're being selected and used as examples. Other tweets could similarly have been chosen to make the same point. Their value is not that they were posted by person X, but that they sound a certain way or address a certain topic. I would err on the side of protecting the person, because I can't anticipate the harm and can't anticipate their framework for understanding and can't anticipate how they'd feel about their words being used as an object of my research -- unless, of course, I sought their actual consent, as Casey suggested.
> 
> This conversation is really helping me think about this, thanks all.
> 
> Tarleton
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 7/13/18, 1:46 PM, "Air-L on behalf of paula todd" <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org on behalf of paulatoddmedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>    Hi, a few thoughts ...  Screen names are often creations/public projections
>    and forms of agency, important/expressive in their own way. Signature
>    selections are integral to the full social media message. Exclusion, then,
>    is a form of censorship. If you choose to exclude, you will have to explain
>    why. If the only reason is because someone who uses social media may not
>    understand that their content is public and can therefore (legally) be
>    reproduced or re-mediated on any platform, the same logic could apply to
>    reproducing public content of any type. Very risky. The only cases I could
>    justify such editorializing (selecting which parts of a communication to
>    share) parallel general defamation and hate speech limitations. Social
>    media is public, and of the public sphere; those who want to create
>    private/privileged communication use peer-to-peer, offline, direct
>    messaging, telephone *et al.*
> 
>    Paula
> 
> 
>    *Paula Todd*
>    B.A., LLB.(J.D.), PhD Can. (Digital Journalism)
>    York & Ryerson Universities
>    Toronto, Canada
> 
> 
>    On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 2:23 AM, Hayes, Rebecca M <hayes2r at cmich.edu> 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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