[Air-L] Discord data

[Anna Gjika]

Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. They seem to confirm what I
suspected, which is that it's more about the data collection method, and
that scraping wholesale could be the issue. In an ideal world consent would
be great, but as Jakob notes, when conducting certain types of research -
whether it's hate speech or online harassment, deepfakes etc. (my areas of
research) this isn't always possible. I really appreciate the resources and
language here around public/private and ethics.

And how neat, there's a whole Discord research community, with some
excellent walk through questions - thanks PS!

Wishing you all a happy and restorative holiday season!

Anna


On Wed, Dec 18, 2024 at 6:13 PM PS Berge via Air-L <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
wrote:

> 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>
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