At this point in time, the University of Manchester, where I’m based, has released over 500 published works that use Twitter data. late to change the problematic way in which this data is used?
Some universities are starting to change their ethical review processes to provide greater protection where research is using social media data. At the University of Warwick, for example, a review of ethical austria rcs data procedures led to a new requirement that all research projects using social media data undergo ethical review.
However, similar ethical review processes are not yet evident at all universities or outside of academia, meaning users remain vulnerable to the potential misuse of their data. We therefore need a wider solution that takes into account the following:
Informed consent – users have no idea how often their content is scraped, or to what ends it is used. Being approached for consent by the data scrapers leads to discontent. Twitter itself is in the best position to solve this problem (see yesterday’s post for more on this).
Anonymity – any user can scrape names, locations, and other protected features linked to tweets. A user can then reidentify a tweet by Googling the content of that tweet. One solution could be to provide statistical disclosure control of text data to protect anonymity.