Investigating Conditions for Consent to Analyze Social Media Data

The rapid growth in online social media and the associated internet mediated research have generated a range of new challenges and concerns related to research ethics. A key issue around the development of protocols for ethical approaches to social media analysis is the question if explicit informed consent should be required when conducting research based on messages that were posted on social media. One of the main arguments against such a requirement is the assumption that obtaining explicit informed consent would be unfeasible or at the very least would heavily skew the resulting data in favour of views that follow perceived 'socially acceptable norms'. In this study we propose a citizen centric approach to the question of identifying which types of social media research should require explicit informed consent from the social media users. We are preparing to run a survey to ask a broad range of citizens for which kinds of research, and under which conditions, they would consent to having their social media data analysed for research purposes. In order to understand if, and how, the process of obtaining consent is likely to bias the population sampling of social media studies the questionnaire responses regarding conditions for consent will be correlated with demographics information regarding the politico-socio-geographic-economic background of the respondents. In hopes of obtaining maximally representative sampling across the UK population the survey will be promoted through news items in the popular press. The goal of this questionnaire study is to obtain practical evidence about the concerns of the social media users whose data is analysed in social media based research. It is our hope that this data will provide insights for the development of practical guidelines for the acquisition of social media data for research purposes. We are especially interested in clarifying the kind of transparency/information that prospective participants desire to know about, so that we might practically improve the success rate of ethical participant recruitment for research studies.