If you are considering conducting research on federated messages and services, the following resources may be of help in guiding your approach.
Internet Research: Ethical Guidelines 3.0 Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR): IRE 3.0 is illustrated by way of two elements – namely, (greater) attention to stages of research and what has become a standard problem of informed consent in particularly (but not exclusively) Big Data research approaches. We then list and briefly discuss the primary additional ethical challenges in IRE 3.0 as identified by the AoIR Ethics Working Group (EWG). We offer a general structure for ethical analysis, designed to help identify the ethically-relevant issues and questions, along with additional suggestions for how to begin to analyse and address these challenges in more detail. We offer this general structure as a guide for developing more extensive analyses of specific issues, both current and future.
Privacy in Public?: The Ethics of Academic Research with Publicly Available Social Media Data: The fact that social media data are public, are known to be public, and sell themselves partly on their public nature has allowed anyone with a purpose —e.g., academic researchers, government agencies, and private firms— to access and collect data, confronting few, if any, formal ethical challenges. Regulations differ between social media platforms and across borders, determined by either majority shareholders, government officials, or some uneasy balance of the two. When companies change hands, the issue of how data also changes hands should lead us to question what it means for that data to be public in the first place.
Open Letter from the Mastodon Community: This open letter from the Mastodon community addresses concerns with a paper by Matteo Zignani et al. from the University of Milan on Mastodon content warnings, critiquing it for unethical data collection, lack of anonymization, methodological flaws, and misinterpretation of “inappropriate” content. It highlights the paper’s failure to understand Mastodon’s community use of content warnings, leading to incorrect conclusions about what constitutes inappropriate material. The letter calls for a public apology, retraction of the paper, and further actions from the authors, the University of Milan, the AAAI, and Harvard University.
Research Ethics and the Fediverse: My intent is to provide a non-exhaustive list of ethical issues for researchers. I have written this in plain language for broad accessibility. Those contemplating research should not assume that something that might be seen as acceptable and innocuous on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is acceptable or innocuous within the fedi.
Shifting your research from X to Mastodon? Here’s what you need to know: Since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X and subsequent changes to that platform, computational social science researchers may be considering shifting their research programs to Mastodon and the fediverse. This article sounds several notes of caution about such a shift. We explain key differences between the fediverse and X, ultimately arguing that research must be with the fediverse, not on it.
