Participant Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics

Social computing systems such as Twitter present new research sites that have provided billions of data points to researchers. However, the availability of public social media data has also presented ethical challenges. As the research community works to create ethical norms, we should be considering users’ concerns as well. With this in mind, we report on an exploratory survey of Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research. Within our survey sample, few users were previously aware that their public tweets could be used by researchers, and the majority felt that researchers should not be able to use tweets without consent. However, we find that these attitudes are highly contextual, depending on factors such as how the research is conducted or disseminated, who is conducting it, and what the study is about. The findings of this study point to potential best practices for researchers conducting observation and analysis of public data

Calling All Facebook Friends: Exploring Requests for Help on Facebook

Past research suggests Facebook use is linked to perceptions of social capital, a concept that taps into the resources people gain from interactions with their social network. In this study, we examine a sample of public Facebook status updates (N=20,000) for instances in which users request a response from their network. These attempts to mobilize resources offer insight into the mechanisms through which Facebook is used for social capital conversion. After identifying mobilization requests (N=856), we categorize them by cost (i.e., effort needed to satisfy the request) and type (e.g., opinion, information, social coordination) in order to describe the prevalence of these requests and the extent to which they require effort on the part of the potential responders. Finally, we examine characteristics of these users and the linguistic characteristics of status updates that contain mobilization requests

Comparing Print Coverage and Tweets in Elections: a Case Study of the 2011-2012 US Republican Primaries

Social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, etc. have become more ubiquitous. They have had an increasing role in social movements, elections, and everyday life around the world. Social science is well positioned to explore the power and influence of social media economically, politically, and socially. This article is particularly interested in evaluating whether the sentiment of traditional print media coverage during elections has any relationship to the frequency of election-related tweets. Though television is perhaps more influential in terms of political news, social media is often used to retweet or comment on articles from print journalism. Also, though we increasingly consume news from social media, we often do not think of how opinions are converging or divergent during major events. This article specifically explores the case of the 2011-2012 US Republican primaries. 99 randomly selected articles from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post covering Republican primary debates were hand coded for sentiment and compared with the frequency and sentiment of candidate-related geo-located tweets from urban American users. We also explored whether there is any relationship between print media, and tweet sentiment briefly. Overall, the newspapers sampled as a whole had a weak relationship to tweet frequency and sentiment. Though there is a large presence of journalists on Twitter, the medium is clearly not a facsimile of print media and that other opinions, values, and sentiments may have a stronger influence within the medium. This study is significant both in its mixed methods approach as well as its finding that traditional print media coverage is not generally related to the frequency or sentiment of election-related tweets despite Twitter’s role as a key space for news production and consumption

Politik - gefällt mir?! Soziale Online-Netzwerke als neue Quelle politischer Information

Mit dem Aufkommen des Internets steht den Deutschen seit nunmehr 20 Jahren ein Medium zur Verfügung, das eine zuvor unbekannte Fülle an leicht zugänglichen Informationen bietet. Entsprechend groß waren auch von Anfang an die damit verknüpften Erwartungen. Mit dem erweiterten Angebot würden sich das Informations- und letztlich das Partizipationsverhalten der Bürger verändern (Margretts 2013, S. 421; Jungherr und Schoen 2013, S. 29). Das Internet sollte aber nicht bloß mehr Informationen und Partizipationsmöglichkeiten zur Verfügung stellen, sondern Menschen aus unterschiedlichen gesellschaftlichen Schichten mit politischen Informationen versorgen und so einen Beitrag leisten, bestehende Ungleichheiten in der Gesellschaft aufzuheben oder zumindest abzuschwächen