Artifacts, or primary sources for
my research study pertaining to its context, the internet, may include a wide
range of social media posts, as well as various medias or content uploaded by
the people being observed for a study. These artifacts are highly valuable to
reveal critical discourse among opinions on copyrighted content being algorithmically
removed, without screening content to determine if it was used under fair use
regulation. Thanks to the internet, researchers have access to a wide range of digitized
artifacts, but using them for research would not come without implications. One
central point to take caution of is that some posts/uploaded content can be
hard to determine the original author or if the author is who we think it is (e.g.
online usernames can make it difficult to determine legitimate accounts, especially
if the user uses multiple accounts with different user ids etc.)
On another note in regards to
implications to research/ethics: just because something is up on the internet, am I as
a researcher allowed to publish these posts in my paper? Do I need to seek
permissions, in consideration to privacy? Would I need to consider anonymizing
the original poster’s username among other private information? Would this go
into the ethics section of the research proposal? This would all depend on the
subject of the study, I would think (e.g. if a post is/can be considered as
criminalizing etc.). Because it is on the internet free for all to view and
interact with, we take it for granted (or well at least I have). I would have
to keep in mind to treat digitized artifacts as real life artifacts, since both
can be re-traced to real people (e.g. I.P. address tracking, or having real
name used etc.)
Lilian Le-Dang
This is an interesting post with a lot of questions asked about ethics in quoting social media sources. Similar questions abound. For example, should social media be treated as a public domain or a private space? While twitter is usually viewed as a public platform, can Facebook be treated in the same way? Is the use of social media for quotes, when not explicitly asked for by a news organization, ethically correct? Is anyone really anonymous on social media? And there could be a longer list of these questions.
ReplyDeleteDifferent people may have different opinions toward these questions. But an interview by Social Work Today with 11 social workers, social work students, and legal/technology experts about the ethics and responsible use of blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and message boards suggested an agreed point: A roadmap is needed to help “navigate the sometimes foggy intersection of ethics and social media” (Robb, 2011).
What interests me is, how are we, as information professionals, supposed to find the answers to these questions? What are useful research tools in the investigation of ethical issues? What can we contribute to the design of that roadmap?
In my opinion, it depends on the definition of ethics. If ethics is defined as “moral principles that govern a person’s or group’s behavior”, then what we should do is to look into the moral principles. Therefore, in the case of quoting social media posts, we should investigate into the motivations that drive people into quoting social media. And in that sense, it coincides with my research about “copyright in classrooms”. The cognitive, rather than the social philosophical side of the story will be the focus of the research.
Reference
Chittal, N. (2012). How to decide what can be published, what’s private on Twitter and Facebook? Retrieved from http://www.poynter.org/2012/how-to-decide-what-can-be-published-whats-private-on-twitter-and-facebook/167704/
Lasofsky, J. (2013). Ethical Questions Arise When Quoting Sources From Social Media. Retrieved from http://newszou.com/ethical-questions-arise-when-quoting-sources-from-social-media/
Resnik, D. (2015). What is Ethics in Research and Why is It Important? Retrieved from http://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/bioethics/whatis/
Robb, M. (2011). Pause Before Posting — Using Social Media Responsibly. Social Work Today. V 11 (1). 8-8
How interesting Yun!
ReplyDeleteI had not thought about a sort of collective participation as documented by quoting or to my understanding 'reposting' (depending on the social media's platform that terms it as such) as a form of data to collect for investigation of socially constructed 'ethics' or a whole social group's behaviour. This makes me imagine a quantitative version of my research study... (modeled off of yours, and your respective references :D)