This document discusses ethics issues related to social media research. It notes that social media data blurs public and private boundaries. Guidelines on research ethics need to reflect this change. The document discusses obtaining ethics approval, issues around public versus private data, balancing quantitative and qualitative methods, and considering different stakeholder perspectives including social media users. It also summarizes several social media research projects and papers that have reflected on ethics.

1. “Do I need ethics approval for
that?” Social media data and
research ethics
Blurring the boundaries New social media, new social science?
NatCen launch event - 29th May 2012 (RIBA) #NSMNSS
Farida Vis @flygirltwo

2. Second land grab for the internet?

3. Big data
New oil
Data
wranglers
snake oil

4. data
data
unstructured

5. Quant and Qual research

6. Public data?

7. New guidelines on ethics

8. Reflecting on ethics and social media research

9. Fitna, the video battle: how YouTube
enables the young to perform their
religious and public identities
Liesbet van Zoonen (PI)
Sabina Mihelj (Co-I)
Farida Vis (RA)
Mike Thelwall (honorary member)
May 2009 – May 2010
Project site: http://bit.ly/Fitnaresearch

12. In the presentation of our results, we have anonymized
the channel names. Although YouTube videos can be
considered semi-public data, the kind of network
analysis presented here presents combinations and
relations that posters may not have wished to be easily
and publicly available. A fully annotated version of our
analyses is available on request (6).
From Van Zoonen, L., Vis, F., and Mihelj, S., (2011), ‘YouTube interactions
between agonism, antagonism and dialogue: Video responses to the anti-Islam film
Fitna’, New Media & Society, 13(8): 1284-1300. (emphasis mine)

13. Role of the API + the ethics of the device

14. Paul Lewis
READING
Jonathan Richards
Alastair Dant
Katie Loweth
THE RIOTS
Marta Cantijoch
Yana Manyukhina
Mike Thelwall
Steven Gray
ON TWITTER Rachel Gibson
Andy Hudson Smith
Rob Procter (University of Manchester)
Farida Vis (University of Leicester)
Alexander Voss (University of St Andrews)
[Funded by JISC]

15. Role of Rumours
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/series/reading-the-riots

17. Twitter data as sunflower seeds
‘Twitter brings you closer’: seeing the little data in the Big Data up close
http://futureeverything.org/research/publications/futureeverybody/
#littledata

18. Where Quant and Qual meet

19. Lots of people work with social media data

20. Ethics of different stakeholders
Conflicts of interests?
Access to data and data sharing
What are the roles and responsibilities of the
research community?
How do social media users perceive these
issues?

21. Farida Vis
@flygirltwo
http://researchingsocialmedia.org/
http://thesocialmediasurgery.wordpress.com/