Should industry have access to Twitter data?
25 January 2022
Joseph AllenIn this five-part mini series, Joe Allen gets us thinking about the challenges and ethical implications of using Twitter data.
This is the second part of a five-part series on the ease and ethics of utilising Twitter data, based on a talk I gave at the NCRM Research Methods e-Festival.
In the last post, I explored the audience’s reactions to an example of “socially good” use of Twitter data. In this post, I will be looking at the audience’s reactions to an example of malicious “for profit” use of Twitter data.
A human hand holding a mobile phone with belarus rcs data the Twitter app on the screen
All data used in this blog post is available on the UK Data Service GitHub.
To begin, I introduced my audience to the following industry scenario.
Scenario A large tech company has scraped Twitter data on the locations you visit, how long you spend there and how often you visit. They are using this data to profile you and target you with effective location-based adverts.
In this scenario, Twitter data has been scraped by industry, for profit. I asked my audience, and invite you as readers here, to consider the following questions before I share my own reflections:
Is it okay for Twitter data to be used in this way?
If you were given the option, would you consent to your data being used for this study?
How would you feel if a business reached out to you to thank, inform or compensate you for your public data in scenario 2?
In this scenario, I’m intending to get people thinking about malicious use of data. The tech company’s targeted advertising is a huge misuse of public data. Whilst some methods of scraping Twitter data enable socially good research (as in the example explored in my last post), they can also unfortunately enable less desirable scenarios like this one. In this instance, we are reminded of how important context is in the decision of giving consent.