[Air-L] Discord data

[PS Berge]

Hi Anna and AoIR friends!

Glad to see this conversation happening--this is a subject that folks over
in the Discord Academic Research Community (lovingly called the D/ARC;
https://darcmode.org) have been discussing for a while! As you've pointed
out, so much of the language that exists around ethics and social platforms
assumes that "privacy" is obvious and paramount, when the question of
"private data" is complicated and even unhelpful as a framework for
approaching Discord. Quite fortuitously, the D/ARC leadership team just
published a blog post on precisely this subject that might be of interest
to folks here: https://darcmode.org/ethics-101/.

How do we (succinctly and effectively) argue that a Discord server or
channel is private or public? All Discord servers are fundamentally "invite
only," but some are "Verified" or "Community-Enabled" or "Discoverable" in
Discord's internal search. For this very reason, we've had members be told
wildly different things by review committees, from "All data on Discord is
protected, because all servers are invite only!" to "Well, it's kind of
like a forum, so it's all public and you don't need an ethics review!" The
use of scrapers, especially bots and third-party integrations, to collect
data has also been met with varying confusion. I'm glad to say there's
forthcoming research in this area from folks in our community, which
hopefully will add some meaningful literature and methods.

As we mention in the blog post above, we're actively looking for further
resources/tools/literature scholars are using when it comes to conducting
research on/about Discord. If you have others we don't have listed, please
let us know and if you're doing Discord-related stuff and haven't joined
our cheery corner of the internet, we'd be glad to hear about what you're
working on! :)

Best wishes,
✨ PB

On Wed, Dec 18, 2024 at 9:59 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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-- 

Dr. PS Berge, PhD (they/her)

*Assistant Professor of Experimental Game Design*

Media & Technology Studies Program

Department of Women's and Gender Studies

University of Alberta

Study Media & Make Games

🌐 psberge.com | 🦋 @iceberge
<https://bsky.app/profile/iceberge.bsky.social>