6 - The Ethics of Using Social Media Data

Summary

The book concludes with Chapter 6’s discussion of the particular ethical concerns raised by using social media data. This includes data privacy concerns, for instance the need in some contexts to anonymize unique user identifiers in all stored tweets so that not even the researchers have access to user names and such. In addition, the chapter mentions concerns frequently raised by IRB in terms of human subjects research, and some of the thorny issues raised by the terms of use of social media sites with regard to data sharing and replicability. In particular, it will walk through what scholars need to know about the limitations imposed by Twitter’s terms of use, what use cases are considered acceptable use (sharing data among researchers on the same project), and strategies for common scholarly needs that fall within gray areas (for example, providing word frequency matrices so that content analysis can be fully replicated, but the terms of use conditions regarding republication of tweets are not violated).