The Ethics of Twitter Research:A Topology of Disciplines, Methods

& Ethics Review Boards

Michael Zimmer and Nicholas ProferesUniversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Agenda

• The Rise of Twitter Research• Mapping the Landscape of Twitter Research• Ethical Dilemmas and Conceptual Gaps

Why Twitter?

• 400 million tweets per day• 1.6 billion search queries per day• 500 million active users

– 53% female– 63% under 35– 16%/25% African American; 11% Hispanic

• History of user innovations• Open, machine readable data streams

Why Twitter?

• “pointless babble”, aka phatic communication• Emergency communication• Political protest & organization• News & entertainment• Celebrity & gossip• Advertising & promotion• Personal interests, activities, photos• Link sharing

Rise of Twitter Research

• Researchers working with Twitter data at various levels of scale and complexity have already generated rich insights into the use of this social media platform– Communication studies– Information science– Social sciences– Digital humanities

http://www.danah.org/researchBibs/twitter.php

New Awareness: Library of Congress

“Have you ever sent out a ‘tweet’ on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.”

“That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress.”

http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/

New Awareness: Library of Congress

• “So with no warning, every public tweet we’ve ever published is saved for all time? What the hell. That’s awful.”

• “I can see a lot of political aspirations dashed by people pulling out old Tweets. I’ve always thought of the service as quite banal and narcissistic.... I think I’ll close my account now. I don’t need to risk Tweeting something hurtful or stupid that will be around for all recorded time.”

• “Now future generations can bear witness to how utterly stupid and vain we were – 1. for creating this steaming mountain of pointless gibberings, and 2. for preserving it for posterity. LOC, you nimrods.”

http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/

Open Questions re Twitter Research

• Is permission necessary to collect public tweets?• Can users opt-out from being in permanent archive?

Delete tweets?• Will geolocational and other profile data be included in

archives? Treated as PII?• What about a public tweet that is re-tweeting a private

one?• Did users ever expect their tweets to become part of

research projects or perpetual archives?• How are IRBs treating Twitter research? Is it human

subject research? Or just analysis of data/text?

Mapping the Landscape

• What disciplines are engaging in Twitter research and what amount of scrutiny of research ethics is typical within these fields?

• What research questions are being investigated, what data is being gathered, and how?

• Are subjects notified or given the opportunity to opt-out of being studied?

• How are research ethics boards evaluating such projects?

Topline

• 244 Studies examined– 194,933,508 users in datasets– 13,897,266,813 tweets analyzed

• All public tweets from July 2010 to Oct 2011 were used for research study. If you posted on Twitter public during that period, you are part of a dataset.

Ethical Dilemmas & Conceptual Gaps

• Emergence of new technologies often lead to conceptual gaps in how we think about ethical problems, and how we address them

– Computer technology transforms “many of our human activities and social institutions,” and will “leave us with policy and conceptual vacuums about how to use computer technology”

– “Often, either no policies for conduct in these situations exist or existing policies seem inadequate.

– Jim Moor, “What is Computer Ethics?”

Conceptual Gaps in Twitter Research

• Rise of Twitter research presents new conceptual gaps in our understanding of key ethical issues:– Privacy– Consent– Anonymity vs. Identifiability– Human subjects

Conceptual Gap: Privacy

• Presumption that because subjects make information publicly available on Twitter, they don’t have an expectation of privacy– Researchers/IRBs might assume everything user had full

knowledge of public nature of Twitter– Assumes no harm could come to subjects if data is already “public”

• New ethical problems…– Ignores contextual nature of sharing– Fails to recognize the strict dichotomy of public/private doesn’t

apply in the 2.0 world– Need to track if ToS/architecture have changed, or if users even

understand what is available to researchers

Nissenbaum, H. 2011. “Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life”

Conceptual Gap: Consent

• Presumption that because something is shared publicly, the subject is consenting to it being harvested for research– Assumes no new harm can come from use of data already made

public; no different than observing conversations in public spaces

• New ethical problems…– Must recognize that a user making something public online

comes with a set of assumptions/expectations about who can access and how

• Even if incorrect assumptions

– Must recognize how research methods might allow un-anticipated access to “restricted” data

Conceptual Gap: Anonymity vs. Identifiability

• Presumption that stripping names & other obvious identifiers provides sufficient anonymity– Assumes only PII allows re-identification

• New ethical problems…– Ignores how anything can potentially identifiable

information and become the “missing link” to re-identify an entire dataset

– “Anonymous” datasets are not achievable and provides false sense of protection

• Can Twitter data be reidentified based on geolocational data? Social graph? Links and hashtags?

Ohm, P. “Broken promises of privacy: Responding to the surprising failure of anonymization.” UCLA Law Review

Conceptual Gap: Human Subjects

• Researchers (esp. CompSci) often interact only with datasets, objects, or avatars, thus feel a conceptual distance from an actual human– Often don’t consider what they do as “human

subject” research

• New ethical problems– Must bridge this (artificial) distance between

researcher and the actual human subject– Also consider other stakeholders within the

complex arrangement of information intermediaries

Carpenter, K & Dittrich, D. “Bridging the Distance: Removing the Technology Buffer and Seeking Consistent Ethical Analysis in Computer Security Research”

Conceptual Gaps in Twitter Research

• Rise of Twitter research presents new conceptual gaps in our understanding of key ethical issues:– Privacy– Consent– Anonymity vs. Identifiability– Human subjects

Where to we go from here?

• Research: Conceptual & Empirical– Exploring new dimensions of Internet research ethics by Markham;

Soghoian; Carpenter & Dittrich; Buchanan & Ess and others (cited within)– Zimmer planning multi-year project to study the Internet research

landscape, how ethical issues are framed, where researchers & IRBs obtain guidance

• Resources & Outreach– “Internet Research Ethics Digital Library, Resource Center and Commons”

www.InternetResearchEthics.org– “Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Recommendations from

the AoIR Ethics Working Committee”– Buchanan & Zimmer, “Internet Research Ethics” Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy– Outreach to IRBs, PRIM&R, disciplinary groups

The Ethics of Twitter Research:A Topology of Disciplines, Methods

& Ethics Review Boards

Michael Zimmer and Nicholas Proferes@michaelzimmer @moduloone