[Air-L] Including screennames with tweets

[f hodgkins]

An intriguing conversation, and one I have recently tackled in my own work
with social media and crisis communication.
I believe that it is the obligation of the researcher to protect the
privacy of the social media participants- even if the SM participant chose
to universally post their content as public. My view is they are doing so
at the moment -- and while the *content* may linger -- the *intention* may
not.
In my work with crisis Tweets-- I created a synthesis of the content - by
exploring major topics and themes, through QCA.

I agree with @Nick Proferes and I appreciate his link to the paper.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118763366
For other considerations please see the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and
Society   https://bdes.datasociety.net/

Good Luck --

On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 2:32 PM Craig Hamilton <Craig.Hamilton at bcu.ac.uk>
wrote:

> 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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