[Air-L] Including screennames with tweets

[Бодрунова Светлана Сергеевна]

Dear all, dear Rebecca,
thanks for raising this issue - the trend seems to be not to include 
the screennames into publications. But I have a couple of thoughts on 
this as a researcher who has dealt with influencers on Twitter in 
cross-country perspective.

1. The dubious status of a tweet as 'oral-written' seems to lie at the 
bottom of your hesitations. If you treat tweets as oral statements 
produced in private, you will need authors' consent to publish AND a 
reference to the source. If you treat them as published documents, you 
will only need a reference to the source.
But at the same time, be it oral or written, you need to protect the 
source from potential harm - this comes not only from judicial but 
also from journalistic practice. Hence, evaluation (public interest 
against potential harm) is needed in each individual case. The 
scholarly community, just as the journalistic community 50 years 
before that, might wish to elaborate a sort of a list of potentially 
harmful cases or recommendations on how to evaluate this.

Some additional comments that also come from journalistic practice:

1. There is research where accounts of public persons and institutions 
are under scrutiny. E.g. see the works on whether people address 
police or civil servants on Twitter in times of crises or natural 
disasters. Here, research loses its sense if the names are not stated. 
Here, public interest might definitely be higher than potential harm.

In journalism, public people may be photographed when killed (see the 
case of Uwe Barshel in Germany, an old but highly exemplary one), 
chased for cheating on their spouses, asked harsh quetions, etc. They 
need to be ready to get under public attention and scholarly analysis. 
But, again, the scholarly community needs to find ways to define 
public figures on Twitter and maybe treat them different than 
'ordinary people'. Or, are all the accounts now 'public figures'? Or, 
are all the accounts now private (and what to do then with the curated 
accounts of politicians and brands)?

2. What is identifying a user? Is it providing the screenname, or ID, 
or claiming we know the real name? For most of us, there is no chance 
to prove that a particular account is really an account by a 
particular offline person; we're only suggesting that. Formally, we 
can only state that this or that account is called this way and tells 
this or that publicly. But even this can lead to potential harm to a 
given user, as naming an account / screenname in research (say, on 
anorexia, hate speech, radical nationalism etc.) can lead to 
cyberbullying and virtual attacks. Thus, not only the necessity should 
be weighted; but also the community needs to develop least harmful 
ways of identifying the sources of tweets.

Sorry if my considerations are banal :)

Yours,
Svetlana



On Fri, 13 Jul 2018 06:23:14 +0000
  "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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--
Svetlana S. Bodrunova, Prof., D.Polit.Sci.
Head, Center for International Media Research
School of Journalism and Mass Communications,
St.Petersburg State University

+7 921 933 02 14
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