[Air-L] Discord data

[Aure Schrock]

Hi Anna, 

It’s a good question! I have used data from Discord to guide my research on organizing around technology design, culminating in my book Recoding Politics for MIT Press. 

From an ethical perspective, I consider Discord servers to be semi-private. That is, I don't consider the data these communities produce to be “public.” Therefore—and despite the frequently spicy and extremely quotable takes found on these servers—I didn’t quote or otherwise analyze data from Discord servers. However, I used insights gained from Discord-based discussions to guide my research. For example, I could use conversations to locate interview subjects with particular types of knowledge valuable for my research and obtain consent in a traditional fashion at the start of each interview. 

I haven’t had much experience collecting Discord data from a legal perspective, given that I’m now an independent researcher. However, if we understand “scraping” as an automated process, “scraping our services” is a strangely vague phrase. It seems to leave open the possibility for humans to retrieve data in ways that don’t “do harm to Discord” (whatever that means). If I were wording an IRB application, I would not define your data collection method as “scraping” but something else—perhaps "collecting posts from an online message board.” 

Personally, all of this together—the legal and ethical sides of the equation—seems to mean that you could collect data from a Discord server if 1) you did so in a semi-automated, humanistic way (perhaps a laborious cut & paste over time) and 2) obtained the consent of the Discord community you were doing research with, allowing them collectively to consent and each member to opt-out if they so choose. 

But I’m curious, too—how have researchers handled this challenge? 

best
Aure

— 
Dr. Aure Schrock (they/he)
Academic Editor and Writing Coach at Indelible Voice <https://www.indeliblevoice.com/> 
Personal and Professional Links: bio.site/aure <http://bio.site/aure> 

> On Dec 18, 2024, at 8:42 AM, Anna Gjika via Air-L <air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Has anyone worked with data from Discord? They have the following in their
> ToS, and I'm curious how folks have dealt with this from a methodological/
> ethics review board perspective.
> 
> Thanks,
> Anna
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