Social media provides unique opportunities for researchers to learn about a variety of phenomena—it is often publicly available, highly accessible, and affords more naturalistic observation. However, as research using social media data has increased, so too has public scrutiny, highlighting the need to develop ethical approaches to social media data use. Prior work in this area has explored users’ perceptions of researchers’ use of social media data in the context of a single platform. In this paper, we expand on that work, exploring how platforms and their affordances impact how users feel about social media data reuse. We present results from three factorial vignette surveys, each focusing on a different platform—dating apps, Instagram, and Reddit—to assess users’ comfort with research data use scenarios across a variety of contexts. Although our results highlight different expectations between platforms depending on the research domain, purpose of research, and content collected, we find that the factor with the greatest impact across all platforms is consent—a finding which presents challenges for big data researchers. We conclude by offering a sociotechnical approach to ethical decision-making. This approach provides recommendations on how researchers can interpret and respond to platform norms and affordances to predict potential data use sensitivities. The approach also recommends that researchers respond to the predominant expectation of notification and consent for research participation by bolstering awareness of data collection on digital platforms.
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Saving social media data: Understanding data management practices among social media researchers and their implications for archives
Social media data (SMD) offer researchers new opportunities to leverage those data for their work in broad areas such as public opinion, digital culture, labor trends, and public health. The success of efforts to save SMD for reuse by researchers will depend on aligning data management and archiving practices with evolving norms around the capture, use, sharing, and security of datasets. This paper presents an initial foray into understanding how established practices for managing and preserving data should adapt to demands from researchers who use and reuse SMD, and from people who are subjects in SMD. We examine the data management practices of researchers who use SMD through a survey, and we analyze published articles that used data from Twitter. We discuss how researchers describe their data management practices and how these practices may differ from the management of conventional data types. We explore conceptual, technical, and ethical challenges for data archives based on the similarities and differences between SMD and other types of research data, focusing on the social sciences. Finally, we suggest areas where archives may need to revise policies, practices, and services in order to create secure, persistent, and usable collections of SMD.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10455333
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
- Volume:
- 72
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2330-1635
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 97-109
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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