A talk on the ethical challenges of using social media data in academic research delivered as part of the Bite Size Guide to Research in the 21st Century on the 24th of January, Sheffield, SHARR.

1. Ethical Challenges of
Using Social Media Data
In Research
Wasim Ahmed
(wahmed1@Sheffield.ac.uk)
@Was3210
A Bite Size Guide to Research in the 21ST Century
24th of January 2017
Sheffield, SCHARR

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About Me
• Third year PhD student (Faculty Scholarship)
in the Health Informatics Research Group Topic
examines infectious disease outbreaks on
Twitter
• Worked on a number of industry & academic
social media projects + forthcoming book
chapter on social media ethics with Prof. Peter
Bath and Dr Gianluca Demartini

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What is social media research?
• Involves the analysis of user generated content
from social media platforms e.g. of users,
keywords, and hashtags
• Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and
Tinder, are examples of platforms that
researchers may research

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Methods
In New Methodologies for Researching News Discussion on
Twitter Axel Bruns & Jean Burgess (2012) describe a number
of techniques of analysing Twitter data such as :
• Activity patterns over time i.e., time series analysis
• Analysing the content of posts
• Identifying key users
• Mapping key users and key actors overtime
• Advanced network analysis

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Massive Source of Data
• Use of social media and social networking websites
has increased with more households with access to
the Internet (OCED, 2016)
• Twitter reports having 316 million monthly active
users, there being 500 million tweets posted per
day, and 80% of active Twitter users use a mobile
device (About Twitter, n.d.).

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Twitter
• Tweets contain a wealth of data, and mining this
data can provide insight into public opinion and
behaviour responses in particular situations (Chew
and Eysenbach, 2010).
• Twitter is known to attract more research in
comparison to other social media platforms such as
Facebook.

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Ethical Issues Encountered
• PhD topic users Twitter as a primary source of
data – no interviews/surveys
• Non-traditional data for a social science PhD:
concerns over informed consent, and data
confidentiality
• Due to volume of tweets it is impossible to obtain
informed consent from all Twitter users

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Do I need ethical approval?
• Do I need ethics approval? As Twitter data is publically
available for everyone to see.
• Ethics approval is required as when data is analysed
things may emerge from the data that may draw
attention to groups, individuals, and trends etc.
• Beyond what would normally be expected from
engagement on these platforms

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Isn’t social media data public?
• It can be argued that social media data is
public as users know they are sharing
posts publically
• Counter argument is that not all users are
aware their posts are being used for
research purposes e.g., children

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Samaritans Radar App
• Samaritans Radar App designed to detect when
people on Twitter appeared suicidal – used an
algorithm to identify key words and phrases
which indicated distress
• Users who had singed up for the service would
receive an email alert if someone they followed
tweeted such statements

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Samaritans Radar
• Timeline of events
• 30th October 2014 - reassure users and mention Whitelist
• 31st October – mention testing and research input
• 2nd of November – Mention subscribers (3 thousand), and 20 thousand
Twitter mentions and trending for 2 days.
• 4th November – Offer reassurance and that they have listened to feedback
• 7th November – Apologise for any distress caused to the public due to the
range of information and opinion on the app. Suspend the app.
• 14 November – Further apologise for any stress offer number, email, and
website
• 10th of March 2015 – Confirm that the app has been permanently deleted
Launched 29 October 2014 and suspended on 7th November 2014

12. Ethics Application
• Ethics application covered:
• Potential participants: who are the Twitter users
being analysed: general public, organisations,
public figures, specific geographical locations, or
all?
• For Twitter, participants are those whom use
specific keywords & hashtags.
• Data confidentiality and data storage measures:
data is stored on secure laptops.

13. Ethics Application
• Consent:
• Ethics application made it possible to gain consent
to use tweets / user handles within publications
• Also possible to gain consent via a tweet if it was
not possible for participants to view a participant
information sheet and complete a consent form
• Electronic versions of participant information and
consent sheets, for example, via a Google form.

14. Ethics Application
• Majority of analysis is aggregate – identifying
themes / clusters of tweets
• Individual tweets and/ or user handles in
original form will never be published
• Data is analysed confidentially and never in
public

15. Case studies discussed
within NSMNSS network
• Facebook emotion study (Jan 2012) positive posts
from 155,000 Facebook users were removed
• Issues of using scrapped data sets e.g., Reddit
dataset containing every publically available Reddit
comment.

16. NatCen Report
• No fast answers but some good work already:
Report by NatCen - Research using Social Media;
Users’Views
• Findings: Participant’s views about research using
social media fell into three categories: scepticism,
acceptance and ambiguity.

17. NatCen Report
• Research using Social Media; Users’ Views
Users were concerned that:
• People behave differently online
• Views may be exaggerated
• Comments may be impulsive
• Profiles may be inaccurate

18. NatCen Report
• Research using Social Media; Users’ Views
Suggestions for improving research practices:
• Sampling and recruitment – be transparent in
purpose and aims in order to ethically recruit
participants to online and social media
research

19. NatCen Report
• Research using Social Media; Users’ Views
Suggestions for improving research practices:
• Consider how you will collect or generate data
– to improve representativeness of findings
and to understand privacy risks of platform
used in a study in order to uphold protection

20. NatCen Report
• Research using Social Media; Users’ Views
Suggestions for improving research practices:
• Take care in reporting results – to protect the
identify and reputation of participants,
maintain their trust in the value of the research
and contribute to the progression of the field
by being open and honest in reporting.

21. • Wisdom of the Crowd ‘#SocialEthics’ report
(Ipsos MORI and Demos/CASM)
• Findings: public awareness that information on
social media can be mined for research is low
compared to other uses of social media data
#SocialEthics report

22. Recommendations for Researchers:
• Researchers to work with developers – only
collect data that is required by the project, and
remove if not required
• Move to a culture of questioning whether the
data being collected is really necessary for a
research project
#SocialEthics report

23. • Examples of data minimization for a project may
include:
• Removing author’s name and @tag/userhandle
#SocialEthics report

24. • Examples of data minimization for a project may
include:
• Removing metadata that is not relevant for the
the purposes of a research project such as GPS
GPS data that might be attached to the social
media post
• Creating generalized groupings of data rather
rather than analysing specific data e.g., by cities
cities instead of exact street locations
#SocialEthics report

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Data Protection Act
• Section 33 of the DPA contains exceptions for
personal data used in research i.e., exemption
from principle 2 and 5
• Research is not defined in the DPA, but may
include research for commercial purposes
• Still need to comply with other DPA
principles

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New guidance from UREC
• University Research Ethics Policy – “In all cases
where social media data is being used for
research purposes, ethical approval must be
gained prior to collecting and analysing data.”
(The University of Sheffield’s Ethics Policy Governing
Research Involving Human Participants, Personal Data and
Human Tissue: version 7)

27. Conclusion
• Genuine ethical issues around researching
social media
• Academic researchers refer to best
practice guidelines when conducting social
media research
• Ethics application allows you to think
through ethical implications from the
beginning of the research process
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Questions?

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References
About, (n.d.). About Twitter, Inc. [Online]. Retrieved from: https://about.twitter.com/company [Last Accessed 29/03/16].
OECD (2016). [Online]. Internet access (indicator). Available at: https://data.oecd.org/ict/internet-access.htm.doi:
10.1787/69c2b997-en [Last accessed 14/08/16].
Chew, C., & Eysenbach, G. (2010). Pandemics in the age of Twitter: Content analysis of tweets during the 2009 H1N1
outbreak. PLOS ONE, 5(11).
Beninger, A. K., Fry, A., Jago, N., Lepps, H., Nass, L., Silvester, H. (2014). Research using social media; users’
views. NatCen Social Research. [Online] Available at: http://www.natcen.ac.uk/media/282288/p0639-research-
using-social-media-report-final-190214.pdfnhttp://www.natcen.ac.uk.[Last accessed 28/11/15]
Ranco, G, Aleksovski D, Caldarelli G, Grčar M, Mozetič I. (2015). The Effects of Twitter Sentiment on Stock Price
Returns. PLoS ONE 10(9): e0138441.

30. To
Discover
And
Understand.