[Air-L] Inquiry on screen shots

[Deen Freelon]

Hi all, very interesting and relevant discussion. I just want to point 
out that while the following does indeed faithfully represent the letter 
of Twitter's TOS, it is nigh-impossible to implement technically on 
one's own.

On 2/27/2019 8:17 PM, Stuart Shulman wrote:
> Every single spreadsheet (or other non-compliant
> collection) of Tweets without a live connection to Twitter (to confirm the
> Tweet is not yet deleted) violates the Twitter ToS and the basic notion of
> the "right to be forgotten" as articulated through European public policy
> when a researcher looks at the deleted content.

This being the case, it is no exaggeration to say that the vast majority 
of published Twitter research probably violates this part of the TOS. 
Certainly all aggregate studies of Twitter data that haven't purged 
deleted tweets by the time of publication do. (And what about tweets 
deleted post-publication?)

Unenforceable clauses like this are part of why I have recommended that 
traditional human subjects concerns, rather than TOS designed for 
corporate clients, guide researchers' use of social media data. See 
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/56f4q and 
https://medium.com/on-archivy/twitters-developer-policies-for-researchers-archivists-and-librarians-63e9ba0433b2

All that said, I'd say publishing screenshots of social media content 
without consent is bad practice in all but the most public of cases. 
Notice how that differs from following the above TOS provisions to the 
letter: the ethical standards I apply to these kinds of cases are the 
same as are commonly used for private communications between researchers 
and research participants.

Best, /DEEN


-- 
Deen Freelon, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Media and Journalism, UNC-Chapel Hill
http://dfreelon.org | @dfreelon <https://twitter.com/dfreelon> | 
https://github.com/dfreelon