Research Ethics for Students and Teachers: Social Media in the Classroom
Faculty are using social media in the classroom more and more. It’s exciting to have students engage real world discussions with thought leaders in real time. But these practices raise some important questions. What is the cost to the social media user that you expect your students to engage, for free? Should students contact social media users? If so how? We hope to answer these questions and more in the following guidelines for syllabi.
When designing a social media project you need to think about potential risks and benefits to the social media users you’d like your students to engage, study, read, follow, etc. In general, we do not recommend having your students interact with users without their consent. This means approaching users before your class starts and finding out if they’d be open to you and your students engaging their feed. Many users may be opposed to such an inquiry. There are many cases of academics, scholars, and journalists engaging people’s social media content in ways that cause harm to the users. If users say no, or don’t respond, respect these actions as a boundary.
Social media refers to online platforms, websites and games where the content is produced by the users for free. Social media is generally defined by the way it is designed to be used: social media is designed for users to connect with a small or large population through these sites, and often post material that is intended for a specific audience, even if it can be accessed by a larger, unintended audience.
Anyone with an account on the platforms named is a social media user. People who read material without accounts on these platforms are also social media users. Some folks post or use these platforms so much that they have gained the attention of traditional media outlets. These users experience a disproportionate amount of interest from journalists, researchers and other social media users. Not all attention is good attention. Frequently, heightened attention by journalists, researchers, and others opens up a social media user to harassment, threats of violence and violence. For this reason, the ethical approach to conducting social media research even as a student is to ask for consent before using someone else’s social media content in your research project. Just because someone has posted on a social media site, does not mean that they have consented to become targets.
Material posted on social media is not the same as a ‘text’ -- like a book, article in a newspaper, etc. Because many social media users tweet for themselves, not for work and not for profit, their tweets should not be read in the same way one reads other types of professionally produced media. While users may be willing to talk to people they know, and other users they choose, this does not mean they want to be analysed or in conversation with you or your students. While these tweets might be public, that does not mean that they should automatically be fodder for a class project or an article.
When you use social media users’ timelines in class discussions and projects, you might treat them like a traditional texts (books, articles, etc.). The user, however was not compensated for what they wrote. This is a common misconception! Social media users may gain celebrity, but this doesn’t come with the economic stability provided by other kinds of work and doesn’t necessarily translate into future economic prospects like other kinds of prestige. Social media users also don’t usually receive professional credit the way academics do for publications. Social media authors’ intellectual contributions to your classroom are the result of free labor and should not be treated the same as a book or article that has passed through the editorial processes, contracts, and fee payments associated with “publishing.” How can you make a social media user’s interactions with your class worth their time? Can you pay them? Are there other forms of non monetary compensation you could provide?
In her article #transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics, Moya Bailey offers a set of questions for researchers. How might these questions be adapted for your classroom assignment?
In the Twitter Manifesto by Dorothy Kim & Eunsong Kim, they argue that there are specific ways that faculty and journalist should respect twitter users. These include:
1. Reject the object-oriented approach
2. Recognize that journalists, reporters, media companies, professors are not leaders of the analysis — there is no bird’s eye view.
3. Move away from the pyramid to a circular system that values process over product.
4. Allow for a multiplicity of views.
5. Academics should move towards radical research systems that circulate and open dialogue up to participatory modes.
We’ve compiled a brief list of resources that we think are related to the questions of ethics and teaching with social media. Please take a look!
http://eiratansey.com/2015/08/16/my-talk-at-personal-digital-archiving-2015/
I, ________ will conduct my research for this class ___________, in such a way that I try to minimize harm to people I engage for my project. Harm could be _____________________ ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________. I will discuss with my professor and classmates any potential problems that may arise and will do my best to account for the power discrepancies that result from my role as a research in relation to my collaborators[f].
I will not take other people’s words out of context, and I will do my best to provide the the original context of social media materials that I quote or paraphrase.
Moya Bailey moyazb@gmail.com
Don’t release these people’s names yet, as Joss hasn’t spoken with them, but some rad folks:
Tyler Ford (yes)
Alok Vaid-Menon (yes)
Olympia Perez
Sasha Alexander
Zahyr Lauren
Jamie Nesbitt Golden
Notes:
Question from University of Saskatchewan Research Ethics Board application
8. Risk, Benefits, Deception:
a) Are you planning to study a vulnerable population? This would include, for example, people who are in a state of emotional distress, who are physically ill, who have recently experienced a traumatic event, or who have been recruited into the study because they have previously experienced a severe emotional trauma, such as abuse.
b) Are you planning to study a captive or dependent population, such as children or prisoners?
c) Is there is an institutional/ power relationship between researcher and participant (e.g., employer/employee, teacher/student, counsellor/client)?
d) Will it be possible to associate specific information in your data file with specific participants?
e) Is there a possibility
y that third parties may be exposed to loss of confidentiality/ anonymity?
f) Are you using audio or videotaping?
g) Will participants be actively deceived or misled?
h) Are the research procedures likely to cause any degree of discomfort, fatigue, or
stress? i) Do you plan to ask participants questions that are personal or sensitive? Are there
questions that might be upsetting to the respondent?
j) Are the procedures likely to induce embarrassment, humiliation, lowered self-esteem,
guilt, conflict, anger, distress, or any other negative emotional state?
k) Is there any social risk (e.g., possible loss of status, privacy or reputation)? l) Will the research infringe on the rights of participants by, for example, withholding
beneficial treatment in control groups, restricting access to education or treatment?
m) Will participants receive compensation of any type? Is the degree of compensation sufficient to act as a coercion to participate?
n) Can you think of any other possible harm that participants might experience as a
result of participating in this study?
Video Questions for Social Media Authors/Content Producers/Participants
What social media do you post on?
Why do you post on social media?
Do you think of the work you post on social media to be ‘public’? Why or why not?
Who are you in conversation with when you post on social media?
What are the risks you face in being a social media maker?
What would you like to say to students who might come across your online work in the course of their research?
Have you ever been negatively impacted by your social media use?
How would you like teachers, students, scholars and journalists to treat your work?
And then the work of Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) that I've been pointed to and lightly following but suspect has some useful resources.
https://www.zotero.org/groups/web_archiving_in_college_archives/items
[g][h][i][j]
[a]This section needs a little bit of work. Perhaps a short blurb or bibliographic entry for each. And is there new stuff since we last visited this work? Just to consider before we hand it over to Liz for design.
[b]_Marked as resolved_
[c]_Re-opened_
I've been having undergrad students take the online CITI training in Basic Human Subjects Research. They bring up great concerns for do no harm and privacy for girls under 18 in our study of YouTUBE which was not listed as a SNS.
[d]Oh man, YouTube and under-age issues are so intense. And so many under-18s are on Youtube. Platform specificity is such a major point.
[e]Does anyone talk to their students about using DuckDuckGo browser for their searches and work online esp. relating to protecting their own online persona? And do you recommend buying a VPN or insuring they use it while doing research or study in classrooms?
I use Private Internet Access. They provide these statements on their site:
Dangers of NOT using PIA
The recent string of security breaches on major corporations by malicious hackers and scammers is a huge cause for concern. However, security breaches can happen to individuals who use the internet because your IP address can be seen by the public. Your data can be logged, monitored, and analyzed by your ISP, which can be used by marketers to aggressively target your computer.
Those who are often on public Wifi are vulnerable to hackers and snoopers who try to obtain your private information as the data are being passed between your computer and its destination. By using PIA's VPN service, your IP address can be hidden so that onlookers cannot obtain your information.
Benefits of using PIA
Private Internet Access provides the best service for hiding and redirecting your IP address. The service redirects your IP address to one of our own servers through a private network tunnel over a public network. In addition to hiding your IP address, PIA encrypts your data at a packet level which provides you with another layer of security.
To PIA, your online security as well as privacy is greatly important, thus we do not keep logs of any of your data making you virtually untraceable. You will be able to surf the web anonymously without having to look behind your back constantly. You will also gain unrestricted access to the internet to its fullest. The service will allow you to bypass censorship and firewalls placed by you
[f](This is Regina) Include an optional clause about informing the OP of significant use? Can bring up significant methodological issues for classroom address.
[g]This section needs a little bit of work. Perhaps a short blurb or bibliographic entry for each. And is there new stuff since we last visited this work? Just to consider before we hand it over to Liz for design.
[h]_Marked as resolved_
[i]_Re-opened_
I've been having undergrad students take the online CITI training in Basic Human Subjects Research. They bring up great concerns for do no harm and privacy for girls under 18 in our study of YouTUBE which was not listed as a SNS.
[j]Oh man, YouTube and under-age issues are so intense. And so many under-18s are on Youtube. Platform specificity is such a major point.