Ethical research with social media data: informed consent in large-scale quantitative studies
Résumé
Social media have become a common source of research data, offering high volume, high diversity and ease of access. Nevertheless, beyond the basic legal requirements, the ethics of mining social media data is quite complex. In this paper, we briefly review the state of the art recommendations and propose a specific and practical approach through the example of the Virtual-EngAge project, a project in which computational methods are employed for a quantitative study. In the context of designing this project, we analyze the questions of consent and privacy in detail, discussing the limitations of informed consent in particular. Through the perspective of Information Ethics, we advocate for a holistic understanding of the ethics issues related to using social media users' data, as opposed to the standardized "box-ticking" approach that informed consent forms may tend to favour. We conclude that explicit consent is not always required, in particular if the outcome of the study is in aggregated form, i.e. in such a way that individual data is not released outside its original context.
Domaines
Traitement du texte et du document
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