While Facebook faces scrutiny over how user data is used and collected, there’s growing awareness that our “tweets” are also being used to provide insight into consumer behavior. (Thomas Malbaux)
Social computing researcher Casey Fiesler, an assistant professor in the University of Colorado’s Department of Information Science, is co-author of a study on how tweets are used. Of about 68 million active U.S. Twitter users, Fiesler said 268 were surveyed, with an average age of 32.
“So this was a survey, and we asked people generally how they felt about this, whether they were previously aware,” she said, “and one of the striking things we found was that the majority of our participants had no idea, previously, that this was a thing that could happen.”
Sixty-two percent of the people surveyed did not know researchers used their tweets, and 61 percent thought it would be a breach of ethics. Twitter’s privacy policy states that public information can be broadly disseminated to a wide range of users, including universities.
Fiesler said there are uses for “tweeted” information in the name of science that may not be intended by people with Twitter accounts, but added that she doesn’t think they need to stop using social media or lock up their information.
“I think that most people know intellectually that Twitter is public,” she said, “and I would actually say that research is one of the less harmful things that could happen with a tweet.”
Fiesler said most survey respondents were more comfortable having a tweet they’ve posted analyzed along with millions of others, or quoted anonymously, rather than having tweets attributed to them when they are used.
“Lots of researchers also look at things like Instagram, Yelp reviews,” she said. “Anything that is just public, so that anyone on the Internet can see it, is a typical ethical heuristic for whether researchers can look at that data.”
The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, recommended that researchers develop ethical guidelines and standards for mining Twitter data from users.
The study is online at journals.sagepub.com.
