Ethics Concerning Preservation of Social Media Posts
Title: Ethics Concerning Preservation of Social Media Posts
Creator: Emma Soulje
Definition of Project
This project is a discussion of the research and information for archivists who are interested in the curation and preservation of information and records created or shared on Social Media. As technology continues to change and evolve the way that people create, share, and use information, it is important for archivists and digital curators to be able to understand preservation techniques for these digital records. Part of understanding this new type of preservation is knowing the procedures and ethics that are in place so that they can be properly preserved. Records created by the people such as the President of the United States are no longer just pieces of paper, but posts to Twitter or Facebook that allows millions of users across the planet to view and engage with. Changes to technology are extremely important to the archival profession as we need to foresee these changes and create policies and procedures that allow for these digital records to be properly preserved. Part of this gaining this understanding is starting to comprehend the ethics that are being questioned and answered behind digital posts on social media as many of the creators do not create limitations or restrictions to their work. This project seeks to identify these challenges and the ethics policies that are being created by them as researchers and archivists are addressing them.
Annotations
Acker, A. & Kriesberg, A. (2017). Tweets may be archived: Civic engagement, digital preservation and Obama White House social media data. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 54(1):1-9.
This source discusses the archiving of presidential social media posts from the presidency of Barack Obama that is being transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The information came from Twitter, Facebook, and Vine. The paper presented the initial observations on the first ‘social media presidency’ (Acker & Kriesberg, 2017, 1). After evaluating the state of the profession and its policies to addressing the incompleteness to addressing this type of records, the article worked to analyze the issues and provide potential solutions to address challenges. This source looks into the materials that are from social media sites that are produced by the president of the United States. This article looks at how presidential archives tackled the first ‘digital’ presidency where the leader had a large online presence.
Espley, S., Carpentier, F., & Pop, R. (2014). Collect, Preserve, Access: Applying the Governign Principles of the National Archives UK Government Web Archive to Social Media Content. Alexandria, 25(1/2): 31-50.
This source discusses the National Archives for the United Kingdom (UK) and its work towards preservation of digital records and the challenges they have encountered along with the solutions that have been designed. The archive designed the Application Programming Foundation (API) and the Internet Memory Foundation (IMF) to capture the record as it is published on social media services Twitter and YouTube. The article provides an outline of the wider web archiving program and its role within the management of the government web estate. It also provided some of the legislative framework that guides web archive of the National Archive and how it has influenced policy decisions for solutions developed. The article also outlines approaches taken by other organizations and commercial services to capture Twitter content. The National Archives addresses these issues so that they are able to develop building blocks for a collection whose growth can be sustained over time. This source can help to enrich our understanding of a National Archives’ policies, procedures, and considerations towards social media.
Jeffrey, S. (2012). A new Digital Age? Collaborative web tools, social media and long-term preservation. Open Archaeology, 44(4):553-570.
This source discusses the impact of new approaches to data sharing, collaborative web tools, and social media on the sustainability of archaeological data. This process looks at the use of technology and social media with older data. The article explores the problems and potential changes in the nature of archaeological dialogue and information sharing (Jeffrey, 2012, 553). The article discusses that the challenges of working with older materials in the context of the new digital age with such a great online presence has created a “digital dark age” (Jeffrey, 2012, 553). This article is important to the discussion of ethics with social media curation is that there are issues and challenges that need to be addressed when looking at organizations that work primarily with older or ‘archaeological’ data.
Li, J. (2015). A Privacy Preservation Model for Health-Related Social Networking Sites. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 17(7): e168.
This source discusses issues of privacy and social networking sites (SNS) in the health care field. The article examined how the increasing use of SNS in health care has resulted in a growing number of individuals posting personal health information online (Li, 2015, 168). This article examined the privacy and security characteristics of leading health-related SNS. It presents a threat model and identifies the most important threats to users and SNS providers (Li, 2015, 168). It presents a privacy preservation model that incorporates individual self-protection and privacy by design approaches. The model that is presented is intended to help develop principle and countermeasures to protect user privacy. While the health care system is different from archival organizations, they have a large variety of policies and procedures in regards to privacy and how they are able to disclose information. This article gives an interesting perspective on privacy and the effects of social media.
Lingel, J. (2013). The Digital Remains: Social Media and Practices of Online Grief. The Information Society, 29(3): 190-195.
This source discusses a literature review of comments posted in response to articles and blog posts discussing Facebook’s policies of deceased site members. The article addresses the sociocultural importance of social media policies in everyday life that daily interactions both online and offline. The article analyzes issues of ownership of online identities and social media site users’ complex relationship to the preservation of digital content. I picked this source because it discusses the issues of social media policies in regards to deceased members. It looks at what policies that social media sites have and their effects on preservation. It looks at ethical issues of privacy and who owns ones online presence and identity when using platforms that have policies in place to protect and support ones identity. Online identity and ownership are major components to this article which gives ideas to who owns the material being posted to social media sites.
Malito, A. (2015). Failure to archive social media could cost advisor; Fira, SEC keeping an eye on new forms of communication. Investment News, 19(43): 0030.
This source discusses an example of when the SEC was facing repercussions from not being able to provide all of their records from company social media accounts and other digital files. The article provides an insight to company preservation policies and the procedures that a company must follow to be complement in order to be held fiscally and ethically responsible for the business that they conduct. This article shows the need for businesses to be able to properly preserve their social media records. As per the some federal policies, businesses are required to keep both their physical and digital records for a certain amount of time for legal and fiscal reasons. This article shows the importance of preserving social media posts as well as digital records. I picked this source because it is an example of why this topic is important in today's society. Companies are becoming an increasing presence online and there may be implications for that presence in both their policies and preservation needs.
McNealy, J. (2011). The privacy implications of digital preservation: social media archives and social networks theory of privacy. Elon Law Review, 3(2): 133-160.
This source discusses the privacy implications of digital preservation of social media archives and the social networks theory of privacy. Privacy issues are an important ethical issue that needs to be addressed when considering digital preservations' policies and procedures for an organization. The article discusses the complex issues that surround social media and social network sites. The article discusses the ideas of what information should be archived and what information should not be able to be viewed through an archive. How should these organizations address the privacy issues in a system that has millions of users that create millions of posts every day. The article makes a point that privacy issues need to be figured out so that issues of privacy breach and what is sanctioned.
Post, C. (2017). Preservations practices of new media artists. Journal of Documentation, 73(4): 716-732.
This source discusses the preservation practices of new media artists that work outside the scope of large collecting institutions and how artists decide to preserve new media artworks that are in their custody (Post, 2017, 716). They looked into these approaches through various case studies and interviews during visits to the artists’ studios. I picked this source because of its discussion of ownership amongst artists and their creations before and after institutional custody. This source provided an external view of the preservation techniques that occur outside of an organization that has strict preservation policies and procedures. It details a different perspective that some are attempting due to the newness and overall changing atmosphere to social media. It looks at ideas of ownership and who has ownership over media items in a digital environment.
Valenza, J. K., Boyer, B. L., & Curtis, D. (2014). Social Media Curation. Library Technology Reports, 50(7): 1.
This source discusses a study completed on academic librarians about the importance of embedding support for learning in curation efforts as well as online learning and teaching skills for managing information (Valenza et al., 2014, 1). The study covers how members of the study shared, saved, cited, and archived scholarly information. The article discusses the workflow process that professionals used at Capella University and Georgia Institute of Technology and their curation efforts Social with SNS sites such as Twitter. They explain that the increased need for social media curation is due to the increased use from students using these places as sources, broadcasting, and for communication (Valenza et al., 2014, 1). They also discussed how social media sites have started becoming a host for archives where information is placed onto these sites for people to access.
Zhu, H., Huang, C., Rongxing, L., & Li, H. (2016). Modelling information dissemination under privacy concerns in social media. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 449(1):53-63.
This source discusses social media and the implications of user privacy and information dissemination. The study looks at the evolution of how privacy concerns impact the process of information dissemination (Zhu et al, 2016, 53). The study looked specifically at general social media users, special users, and observers and how user privacy settings affected information being accessible (Zhu et al, 2016, 53). Social media settings can have an effect on what information can be archived and accessible. Looking at the users that are creating information and how each individual decides to privatize their information on their social media accounts needs to be discussed as an ethical issue for preservation. An important aspect that this article brings up is the different types of users that are on social media sites such as general users and special users such as celebrities whose image and accounts are more accessed on a daily basis.
