TY - JOUR
T1 - Overcoming terms of service
T2 - a proposal for ethical distributed research
AU - Halavais, Alexander
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - The last two years has marked a turning point in access to large-scale social media data for many researchers, as platforms hobbled their APIs and made recording, archiving, and analyzing social life online far more difficult. Particularly in the context of the United States, where violating the rules put in place by social platforms has the potential to lead to criminal charges, the balance of power between the extremely financially successful social media industry on one side, and the users and researchers of these platforms on the other, has become dangerously skewed. This article argues for a pragmatic partnering with the users to do research, rather than with the platform owners, and suggests some ways in which this might be accomplished.
AB - The last two years has marked a turning point in access to large-scale social media data for many researchers, as platforms hobbled their APIs and made recording, archiving, and analyzing social life online far more difficult. Particularly in the context of the United States, where violating the rules put in place by social platforms has the potential to lead to criminal charges, the balance of power between the extremely financially successful social media industry on one side, and the users and researchers of these platforms on the other, has become dangerously skewed. This article argues for a pragmatic partnering with the users to do research, rather than with the platform owners, and suggests some ways in which this might be accomplished.
KW - Big data
KW - decentralization
KW - platform politics
KW - research ethics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85067837515&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85067837515&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1627386
DO - 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1627386
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85067837515
SN - 1369-118X
VL - 22
SP - 1567
EP - 1581
JO - Information Communication and Society
JF - Information Communication and Society
IS - 11
ER -