[Air-L] Including screennames with tweets

Sat Jul 14 11:59:11 PDT 2018

Just wanted to add my appreciation for this discussion! The distinctions and deliberations that are emerging are very much in tune with my recent experience of helping my PhD students negotiate their ethics applications.

One thing I don’t think anyone has mentioned (unless I have missed it) in this discussion is the possibility of including links to tweets, rather than the original text of the tweets, in publications. This means that as long as the users responsible for the tweets in question have not deleted them, they are available in full to readers of the publication, but they are not made “more permanent” by their inclusion in a new context. This may help solve some of the problems that we have heard about in this discussion, though it is of course not without its own problems (e.g. people changing their names over time could have an impact on analyses where names carry information value).

I hasten to add that this is not my idea - unfortunatlely I can’t remember where I first read about this practice.

Best, Johnny

Dr J W Unger
Lecturer and Academic Director of Summer Programmes
Department of Linguistics and English Language
Lancaster University
LA1 4YL

e-mail: j.unger at lancaster.ac.uk<mailto:j.unger at lancaster.ac.uk>
tel: +44 1524 592591<tel:+44%201524%20592591>
Follow me on Twitter @johnnyunger<http://twitter.com/#!/johnnyunger>
On 14 Jul 2018, 00:20 +0100, Бодрунова Светлана Сергеевна <s.bodrunova at spbu.ru>, wrote:
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
_______________________________________________
The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers
http://aoir.org
Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
http://www.aoir.org/

--
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<tel:+7%20921%20933%2002%2014>
spasibo-tebe at yandex.ru
_______________________________________________
The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
http://www.aoir.org/