Social Media Ethics

Jessica Jordan

The Changing and Evolving Landscape for Social Media Archiving Ethics

Definition of Project
Social media archiving and preservation ethics are still evolving, due to ever-changing technology, legislature, and the nuanced terms of service agreements each social media outlet drafts. The literature presented below gives some useful case studies, guidelines, and basic framework for archivists and preservationists interested in the preservation of social media. As will become apparent in the annotations below, many articles have used website archiving ethics as a basic model, and adapted those to fit social media constraints. For example, many social media archivists use a social media site’s terms of service agreements as a starting point, then from there develop ethical standards for harvesting data sets (as opposed to harvesting user profiles) in an effort to protect user privacy.

These articles will be helpful for social media archivists looking for guidance on best practices as it relates to social media’s constantly evolving technology and terms of service agreements, and the articles present an overview of the development of ethical standards that have occurred over time and technological change. For example, one article details a case study involving the Library of Congress’ project of archiving all of Twitter’s public tweets over the course of a little over a decade. There were some successes and challenges with that project, but it it provides an informative case study on social media preservation ethics. Though social media curation and preservation ethics are changing with social media sites and applications, these articles can provide valuable insight and guidance in establishing a code of conduct or ethical guidelines for repositories.

Annotations
Velte, A. (2018) Ethical challenges and current practices in activist social media archives. The American Archivist, 81(1), 112-134
This article evaluates and elaborates on a small study where three social media archivists were interviewed about the various ethical challenges they faced in the performance of their work. While the survey sample was small, the information and suggestions given by the archivists are the most up-to-date and relevant for the issues currently facing this particular profession. While all of the archivists agreed that legal and ethical issues are biggest obstacles facing curation for a social media archiving project, there were several solutions presented to overcome some of those challenges. One of the study’s archivists said they begin any project by reviewing the terms of service of the particular social media channel they are searching through to find potential digital objects for preservation purposes. Then they curate social media posts by searching by hashtag, and take great care protect the user’s identity. Other archivists said they ask users for permission before harvesting the data. An important distinction was made in the study’s results that there is a difference between collecting social media data sets, which protect users’ identity, and dealing with social media accounts, where archivists often seek permission to collect from an activist group with a social media presence.

Campbell, L. & Dulabahn, B. (2010, September). Digital preservation: The Twitter archives and NDIIPP (pp. 275-278). Poster presented at iPRES, the 7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, Vienna, Austria
This article provides some context to an early and well-publicized case study in social media archiving: the Library of Congress’ archiving of all public tweets shared through Twitter since it started in 2006. This project was discontinued a little over 10 years later, due to storage issues and the complex nature of tweets (images, videos, and animated .gif files). Campbell and Dulabahn touch on privacy issues in their post presentation, but unfortunately they offer some out-of-date guidance, as can be discerned in their statement that “[u]nder the Twitter terms of service, users give Twitter the right to archive tweets,” (Campbell & Dulabahn, 2010, p. 276). More recent articles indicate that Terms of Service agreements do not offer blanket protection for institutions when they plan to harvest and archive social media data. Nevertheless, this article provides an interesting and insightful benchmark for how much things have changed, and how far social media technology has come in a short period of time?. Transition? Terms of Service agreements seem to be a good starting point, but an ethical policy should be more robust and tailored to the specific repository and collection. The Library of Congress’ Twitter archival project is a well-known project, and potentially one that provides an example for how some institutions could encounter ethical obstacles along the way, even with the best intentions toward privacy protection.

Enis, M. (2016, March 15). NCSU debuts social media archives toolkit: collection, preservation, and ethics issues examined. Library Journal, 141(5), 18. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/apps/doc/A446521054/BIC?u=lom_waynesu&sid=BIC&xid=d6ac313a
This brief but useful article describes the debut of a toolkit designed to help cultural organizations develop social media collections and understand current as well as future issues regarding legal and ethical archiving of social content. This toolkit, designed by the North Carolina State University Libraries, was able to complete this project with the EZ Innovation Grant from the State Library of North Carolina, and it is free. The online toolkit also features an annotated bibliography, surveys, and collecting strategies. This is an excellent resource for cultural institutions with limited resources, looking to grow and enhance their social media archiving or preservation projects.

Kinder-Kurlanda, K., Weller, K., Zenk-Möltgen, W., Pfeffer, J., & Morstatter, F. (2017). Archiving information from geotagged tweets to promote reproducibility and comparability in social media research. Big Data & Society. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717736336
Archiving geotagged data is debated again in this relevant and very thorough article. This particular article focuses on archiving and preserving harvested data from Twitter, and presents strong research and arguments for why both geotagging and Twitter data is helpful, not only for archival purposes, but also for general research. For archiving, the authors described their own very large dataset taken from Twitter, which included about half a billion tweets collected over several months between 2014 and 2015. The authors said this data was extremely useful for numerous reasons, but pointed out that halfway through their data collection, Twitter changed its geotagging terms of service, which split their data into two more nuanced sets of data. The authors also explained that geotagging is an important piece of digital curation to preserve, because it helps assess communities, it can help detect geospatial patterns, such as global tourism. A major concern from this article is how it tackles the ethics of user privacy. While Twitter users agree to the social media site’s Terms of Service agreement, they may not understand that their data could be harvested for research. The authors say it is up to the researchers to determine ways to protect user identity – this is disturbing, as it seems there should be a set of guidelines, or a framework to do this with large datasets.

Light, B., Mitchell, P., & Wikström, P. (2018). Big data, method and the ethics of location: A case study of a hookup app for men who have sex with men. Social Media + Society. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118768299
Light, Mitchell, and Wikström present a compelling article that not only tackles the ethical issues of archiving location data, but also describes some technical aspects to the actual scraping data to keep it anonymous. They also describe how scraping data from a “hookup app” included GPS coordinates for public sexual encounters, and how this data is considered “risky,” because it provides key information on where public sex may frequently occur (Light, Mitchell, et. al., 2018). There are obvious user privacy issues here, and the findings are fascinating and relevant as it relates to social media archiving ethics. In regards to their study, they found it was unethical to map or present geographic visualizations of the data they collected, however they did present an argument for why it would be ethical: public health concerns, including ways community groups could conduct outreach programs and offer resources to men having public sexual encounters with other men. This article presented nuanced and detailed information on how large datasets from social media applications can present complicated ethical concerns.

Littman, J., Chudnov, D., Kerchner, D., Peterson, C., Tan, Y., Trent, R., Vij, R, Wrubel, L. (2018). API-based social media collecting as a form of web archiving. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 19(1), 21-38. doi:10.1007/s00799-016-0201-7
This article focused on the application programming interface (API) for Twitter, and how a social feed manager (SFM) can be used to collect and help archive data from Twitter. Other social media sites are broadly discussed, but not as in depth as Twitter. The ethical aspect was also explored, albeit briefly. The author says “the ethical, technical, and logistical challenges of social media archiving have been represented at every meeting of the Society of American Archivists since 2010” (Littman & Chudnov et. al., 2018). They later add that ethical concerns are always evolving to match the ever-changing social media landscape. The authors also address a framework that is being discussed – so there is a path forward for social media archivists to proceed ethically, the article just does not elaborate on that framework in a satisfying way (it provides links to other articles, but does not discuss in-depth). Overall, this article was useful because it provided important context (though the descriptions were concise) for how social media archival ethics have been discussed throughout the years it has been an active topic in the profession.

Mare, A. (2017). Tracing and archiving ‘constructed’ data on Facebook pages and groups: reflections on fieldwork among young activists in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Qualitative Research, 17(6), 645–663. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794117720973
While studying young activists in Zimbabwe and South Africa using Facebook for political outreach, Mare also encountered ethical dilemmas in the archiving of the posts. While this is only one archivist’s perspective, it is still a highly useful case study. Before the study began, Mare gained clearance from the university supporting the study’s ethics committee and always clearly identified himself when joining activist Facebook groups, even as a passive observer. Mare also reached out personally to some of the more active Facebook members to gain permission in using their data and online participation as part of his study. This article is thorough in its research methodology and presents an idealistic case study in how to ethically and directly harvest data from users’ profiles, as opposed to data sets.

Moore, J. (2013). ‘Social Media: The Next Generation of Archiving.’ Federal Computer Week, 27(19). Retrieved from: https://wayne.illiad.oclc.org/illiad/pdf/847742.pdf
Despite being written in 2013, this article offered a very current analysis of social media archiving from a governmental organization’s perspective. For example, it references how NASA archives its social media posts, but not the comments, in order to protect the privacy of others not related to the organization (but who might follow or comment on the organization’s social media posts). It also provides a framework for establishing which social media posts “rise to the standard of a federal record” (Moore, 2013, p. 2). Moore was thorough in his research and talked to numerous governmental agencies about their social media archiving policies, and how they differed. This offers a unique perspective in how archiving ethics varies even within governmental organizations and further magnifies that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to this issue.

Raad, E., Al Bouna, B., & Chbeir, R. (2016). Preventing sensitive relationships disclosure for better social media preservation. International Journal of Information Security, 15(2), 173-194. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/10.1007/s10207-015-0278-9
This article covers a range of ethical social media preservation and privacy issues and offers solutions for solving some of the problems this niche profession faces. The authors acknowledge that because social media is a relatively new and rapidly changing technology in people’s lives, there are not set ethical guidelines for social media preservation and archiving. The authors propose a solution called “Event-Condition-Action,” which “continuously monitors the flow if incoming data” (Raad & Al Bouna et. al., 2016). In addition to describing the framework, they also discuss some survey findings and the motivation for writing their paper. All of this is useful information for budding social media archiving and preservation specialists, and while the article focuses on privacy, it and also branches out into technical and resource constraints. The solutions and frameworks provided are interesting and relevant, and the article provides real-world scenarios and flowcharts to facilitate the implementation of their specific strategy.

Zimmer, M. (2010). ‘But the data is already public’: On the ethics of research in Facebook. Ethics and Information Technology, 12(4), 313-325. Retrieved from: doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/10.1007/s10676-010-9227-5
This article is referenced repeatedly by a number of more current journal articles about social media archiving ethics as among the first pieces of writing to address ethical issues and social media. Though this article focuses on research, it references a dataset that was collected and eventually archived at the IQSS Dataverse Network at Harvard University (Zimmer, 2010, p. 315). It describes some crucial elements involving the ethics of social media archiving: users’ privacy protection, geotagging (it was determined that the data was collected from a private school in the Northeast), and the naiveté of collecting data in 2010, when much of social media was still new and privacy concerns or questions from researchers were not as thoughtful or wide in scope as they are today. Additionally, the article raises a number of issues involving these matters that are answered in more current articles addressing social media archiving ethics specifically. For example, Zimmer references the dataset collected from Facebook and says that researchers found that simply removing what they believed to be “all identifying information” (user names), they were protecting users’ privacy. In fact, data remained that would still identify the users, such as geotags and users’ Facebook groups (Zimmer, 2018, p. 319). Zimmer goes on to explain the main difference between what is legal to protect users’ privacy with social media data collection, which varies by state, to what is actually ethical, which is much more narrow in scope. Overall, this article provided an excellent case study of what could go wrong in a very nuanced way.

Additional Bibliography
Daley, J. (2017). The Library of Congress Will Stop Archiving Twitter. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/library-congress-will-stop-archiving-twitter-180967651/