TY - JOUR
T1 - “Participant” Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics
AU - Fiesler, Casey
AU - Proferes, Nicholas
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, © The Author(s) 2018.
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Internet research ethics
KW - Twitter
KW - social media
KW - user studies
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85045005435&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85045005435&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/2056305118763366
DO - 10.1177/2056305118763366
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85045005435
SN - 2056-3051
VL - 4
JO - Social Media and Society
JF - Social Media and Society
IS - 1
ER -