[Air-L] About social media data availability

[Dr. Emma Briant]

Hi there,
It sounds a very reasonable concern. I would just explain this in a written
response to that point in the reviewer’s comments. You don’t necessarily
need to do everything each reviewer says, you just need to address their
concern, show you’ve considered it and explain why you chose to do what you
did, that you have good reason for taking this approach.
Best of luck,
Emma

On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 at 20:17, Xanat Meza via Air-L <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
wrote:

> Hello everyone!
> I have a situation with some social media data we collected for a paper
> that is currently under revision.
> The situation is complex because we collected this data from a Facebook
> group dedicated to a rare medical condition back in 2017, when social media
> data rules were not as strict as they are now. When we requested ethics
> review from our institution, they even told us we did not have to do
> anything in particular and got the study approval without much difficulty.
> Therefore, we requested permission to the group administrators to collect
> posts, posted a permission request for the group members, asking them to
> send us a message if they wished to opt out from the study, and collected
> one thousand posts by hand. We noted that there were many researchers in
> this group and that the members participated in surveys and medical studies
> frequently and with enthusiasm, so we thought at that time that an
> opting-out format would be enough. The data basically consists on user
> name, the texts in the posts, date and time of the posts, number of
> replies, and reactions. We separated the user names and replaced them with
> alphanumeric codes.
> Now, a reviewer of our paper is insisting that we MUST share this data
> openly because it is anonymized. However, we think that it should be
> available upon request, as social media data management has become stricter
> in recent years, particularly on the case of data from vulnerable
> communities. If we place this data related to a rare medical condition in
> an open repository, even people who are not researchers may have access to
> it and use it to bully this Facebook group, even if in theory, they could
> not target specific users.
> Does anyone have any ideas or advise on how we can respond politely to
> this reviewer that it is safer for everyone to keep the data available upon
> request?
> Xanat V. Meza
>
> Ph.D. Kansei, Behavioral and Brain SciencesUniversity of Tsukuba
> M.A. Media and Communication
> Yeungnam University
> B.D. Graphic Communication Design
> Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana
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-- 
Dr Emma L Briant

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