Research ethics fundamentalists in contrast tend to say,
You have to get informed consent for every piece of social media data you gather because we cannot assume automatic consent, users tend not to read platform’s privacy policies, they may assume some of their data is private and they may not agree to their data being used in research. Even if you anonymize the users you quote, many can still be identified in the networked online environment.
There are, however, limits of informed consent in critical research. It can act a censorship of critical research. Imagine you study online fascism or online harassment of women. In most of such cases, it is not feasible but rather dangerous for the researcher to ask for informed consent. “Dear Mr. Misogynist/Nazi, I am a social researcher gathering data from Twitter. Can you please give me the informed consent that I quote your violent threat against X?”. Asking for informed consent in critical research can result in the circumstance that the researcher herself/himself becomes subject to violence or threats.
Some observers recommend to only use aggregated data and not to quote from social media data. Such an approach has, however, a bias towards quantitative methods, and critical social media discourse analysis thereby becomes impossible to conduct. In social media analysis, privacy’s context matters (Nissenbaum 2010). We cannot assume that social media data analysis can never cause harm and that therefore anything goes in data analytics. At the same time, privacy fundamentalism risks to paralyse critical social media analysis. A realistic approach is needed. We need critical-realist social media research guidelines that go beyond research ethics fundamentalism and beyond big data positivism.
The British Psychological Society (2009) argues that online observation should only take place when and where users “reasonably expect to be observed by strangers” (p. 13). This criterion is feasible in many contexts. It implies, for example, that the use of a popular Twitter hashtag during specific mass events (e.g. the use of the hashtag #BBCDebate during the EU referendum campaign’s first televised TV debate) is aimed at public outreach, so that the user cannot reasonably expect to remain unobserved. It would therefore be acceptable to quote these tweets without asking for informed consent. Whether to obtain informed consent or not in critical social media research depends on the specific contexts of data.
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