[Air-L] [Request for Input] Research Practices for Closed Messaging Groups

[connie im dialog]

Dear all,
Hope everyone and your loved ones are doing well.

As part of a project connected to MisinfoCon <http://misinfocon.com/> and The
Carter Center <http://cartercenter.org/>, and also in conversation with the
Secretariat at the Forum on Information and Democracy
<https://rsf.org/en/news/eleven-organizations-civil-society-create-forum-information-democracy-structural-response>,
I have been overseeing a landscape review of current practices related to
researchers entering into closed messaging spaces (e.g. WhatsApp,
Telegram).  This landscape review is intended to inform a set of
recommended practices related to closed messaging spaces to be developed in
conversation among human rights practitioners, election observers, and
fact-checking projects.

We are seeking protocols and examples of research practices mentioned in
papers, in addition to how these efforts define privacy and public
discourse; the particular backdrop has been elections but can be broader.
Examples of issues that we are focusing on:

* how the study defines *public* and *private*
* whether the size of the group matters and how
* whether and how the researchers identified themselves
* what protocols have been defined related to de-identification of
participants, limitation of content collected, and the storage around the
datasets
* whether the study protocol has been reviewed by an IRB or other external
organization

Should you have recommendations of papers and reports to include, I would
love to hear about them here or off-thread.  If you are interested also in
participating in the effort overall, please feel free to reach me
off-thread as well.

Best,
Connie

--
connie moon sehat
connieimdialog at gmail.com
https://linkedin.com/in/connieatwork
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