Overcoming terms of service: a proposal for ethical distributed research

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Big data
• research ethics
• platform politics
• decentralization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alexander Halavais is an associate professor of critical data studies in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University, where he researches ways in which social media change the nature of scholarship and learning and allow for new forms of collaboration and self-government. He directs the MA in Social Technologies program. The second edition of his Search Engine Society was published by Polity in 2017 [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

Alexander Halavais http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7164-9208