[Air-L] Including screennames with tweets

[Judith Rosenbaum-Andre]

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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-- 
Judith E. Rosenbaum, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication and Journalism
University of Maine
414 Dunn Hall
Orono, ME 04469

www.juditherosenbaum.com/
@JudithRBaum