[Air-L] Including screennames with tweets

[Daniel Thomas]

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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