“Participant” Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics

By Casey Fiesler, Nicholas Proferes. 2018

543 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social computing systems such as Twitter present new research sites that have provided billions of data points to researchers. However, the availability of public social media data has also presented ethical challenges. As the research community works to create ethical norms, we should be considering users’ concerns as well. With this in mind, we report on an exploratory survey of Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research. Within our survey sample, few users were previously aware that their public tweets could be used by researchers, and the majority felt that researchers should not be able to use tweets without consent. However, we find that these attitudes are highly contextual, depending on factors such as how the research is conducted or disseminated, who is conducting it, and what the study is about. The findings of this study point to potential best practices for researchers conducting observation and analysis of public data.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f298649194c1be9cb55574c047756ae7e8a62d6b

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Citations in the corpus

Data Governance in the Age of Large-Scale Data-Driven Language Technology (2022, background): “Since that author may not be aware of the visibility of their language data and conceptions of the social benefits (or lack thereof) of various research practices [54], privacy legislation such as GDPR may require that data be used with (revocable) consent, and for the specific purposes that are cle”
Quick, Community-Specific Learning: How Distinctive Toxicity Norms Are Maintained in Political Subreddits (2020, methodology): “In performing this research, we took into account work on conducting ethical research using social media data (Zimmer and Kinder-Kurlanda 2017; Fiesler and Proferes 2018).”
Just What do You Think You're Doing, Dave?' A Checklist for Responsible Data Use in NLP (2021, background): “Fiesler and Proferes (2018) report that regular Twitter users are likely to not even be aware that their tweets can be used by researchers, and the willingness for their data to be analysed depends on the kind of study.”
On learning and representing social meaning in NLP: a sociolinguistic perspective (2021, background): “…and discussions surrounding the use of online data in social media research—not only regarding collecting and storing data, but also how such data is shared, and how analyses based on such data are reported and disseminated (Fiesler and Proferes, 2018; Zook et al., 2017; Fiesler et al., 2020).”
Smart, Responsible, and Upper Caste Only: Measuring Caste Attitudes through Large-Scale Analysis of Matrimonial Profiles (2019, methodology): “The approach taken in this study is especially influenced by recent work around ethical research using social media data (Zimmer and Kinder-Kurlanda 2017; Vitak, Shilton, and Ashktorab 2016; Fiesler and Proferes 2018).”