[Air-L] Including screennames with tweets

Fri Jul 13 09:09:06 PDT 2018

And I'd suggest Casey's earlier article, "When Should We Use Real Names in
Published Accounts of Internet Research?"

It is Chapter 11 in:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digital-research-confidential

Christian

On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 11:17 AM, Proferes, Nicholas <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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> --
> Judith E. Rosenbaum, PhD
> Assistant Professor
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> University of Maine
> 414 Dunn Hall
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