@rra and I have a new, #OpenAccess article out: "Shifting your research from X to Mastodon? Here's what you need to know"
https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2666-3899%2823%2900323-9
This article is an opinion piece in which we argue that social scientists cannot simply port their work from X to #Mastodon or the rest of the #fediverse. There are key differences in culture, expectations of privacy, and of course topology to consider.
@rra @commodon @academicchatter
Our conclusion:
"While Mastodon and the fediverse are quite distinct from Twitter/X and other corporate social media, and while these systems present new challenges to researchers, the benefits for both researchers and for the fediverse can be tremendous. If researchers work with instance admins to produce useful knowledge, that work can be adopted by the fediverse, helping to improve a rapidly growing network."
@rwg @rra @commodon @academicchatter
I like the way you're thinking. I think users here have a much higher willingness to proactively guard their privacy but conversely a much higher willingness to providing help when the goals are transparent and obviously ethical.
Just saying.
@soaproot @rra @commodon @academicchatter
Yeah, I agree. The issue I see is that the easy period lasted long enough, and fueled enough careers, that folks will see the fedi and say, "we can do that there, as well", without reflecting on the differences.
@rwg
> Histories of poor social media
research
So, the story so far: there is a diversity of
cultures across the fediverse. And yet,
across the network, there seems to be a
strong desire for privacy among fediverse
users; fediverse users desire not to
be monitored, included in automated
research, or have their posts included in
search engines without their explicit
consent.
thx
👍
> the benefits for both re-
searchers and for the fediverse can be tremendous
Sry but actually I doubt the "tremendous" benefit for the fediverse .. anyway, you do you.
@rwg @rra @commodon @academicchatter
Great stuff. Something I saw downplayed, however, is how Cambridge Analytica was not only a big deal for the Fediverse; but also Twitter/X. Deen Freelon predicted something of a post-API era to trickle down from Facebook as social media platforms cease to be "town squares" and shift towards gated communities. I'm not saying this be apologetic, but it is important to see how both X and fediverse address the same issue:
https://socialmediaandpolitics.org/53-digital-methods-post-api-era-deen-freelon/
Dr. Deen Freelon, Assoicate Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses how researcher collect and analyze social media data to study politics. We talk about Facebook’s recent API shut-down, the new Social Science One initiative, differences between Python and R programming languages, and one...
@rwg @rra @commodon @academicchatter
There is also a readable version of the Post-API here, if preffered
http://dfreelon.org/publications/2018_Computational_research_in_the_postAPI_age.pdf
@eest9 @rwg
Please don't do this.
RWG wrote a wide-ranging introduction for a community of experts to contribute to the Fediverse. You seized on one word (platform, with multiple connotations) to criticize.
We should be WAY more welcoming than this to people working to bring new voices here.
And you apparently didn't get past the abstract because the linked article goes on to refer to "a larger
ecosystem of alternative social media
platforms known as the Fediverse."
@eest9 @rwg
My message is that the replies to RWG's extended work largely seem to be about nitpicking. When they should be welcoming.
Everyone who wants a larger Fediverse should try to be more welcoming. Rather than make this platform a place of unwritten rules that are scolded about on first sight.
Even the Wikipedia principle of Assume Good Faith would be an improvement.
See also, https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt
@Carwil The reason why I mentioned my approach is, that I think it's one of the biggest problems in onboarding new people (especially researchers). A lot of them do not understand that this isn't a platform and get frustrated in its structure and that their theories, which assume gated platforms, do not hold here, hence getting null results. So I think it's more than a nitpick.
I never assumed bad faith! I was just confused by your comment. @rwg
@eest9 @rra @commodon @academicchatter
Thanks for the feedback! To be honest, I don't mind using another term. I think "platform" as a term is borderline meaningless, given how many different ways it's used:
* to describe operating systems
* in reference to gaming systems
* as a means for someone to speak
* as a set of political doctrines
* as a reference to specific corporate social media
So feel free to mentally substitute "service" if you like.
Thanks for this very interesting work. It's certainly only one of the first steps in a lot of research that needs to go into this. For examples, I've found out that when I added some information about the wider study, responses to my polls increased a lot.
But I am writing to ask you whether you've had any thoughts on one big issue: demographics. Any social research would need to frame its validity within the sample of respondents. Since on social networks participants are self-selected, it is useful if we have some data about demographics and representation. The polls provided by the platform are a great tool, because they are much more immediate to access, as opposed to dedicated survey links. However, the way they are currently implemented in Mastodon, individual posts with polls are not bundled to the demographics of their respondents.
One approach I've had in mind was a posting a series of polls in a short period of time, consisting of (necessarily brief) demographics and few questions.
Another, possibly better, alternative would be to have a platform that strongly encourages users to provide demographics data and that packages this with poll responses. It would be a hard sell in terms of privacy, so I wouldn't say realistic.
Did you have similar questions? Any thoughts?
Consent. That's key. The big difference between here and corporate social media is that people can share what they want. And that they aren't positioned via data analysis (e.g., Facebook will make inferences about people's demographics through analyzing their relationships and behaviors).
So demographic details in fediverse-based research need to be opt-in, which might be suboptimal for the social scientist, but... maybe the era of easily gathering data on people should end?
@rwg @rra
Sure. In the EU we have GDPR which is quite explicit about this.
A nice constraint (from the perspective of privacy) about polls on Mastodon is that they don't give you a mechanism to know who responded (in theory one might try to trace back user exposure to posts and time of increments in votes to trace these back, but this is fiction for now). We don't even have a way to confirm that when we provide two polls (one demographics and one on the research topic), the same person would respond to both. So in terms of privacy, we have a conservative setup, which - as you say - is fair game.
However, my claim is that if we inform users about the way we want to interpret data and have similar response rates to the two, we can safely assume that the answers to the demographics question closely relate to the demographics of the respondents to the research question.
Robert W. Gehl
PJ "Vote Green" Coffey
soaproot
Tim Chambers
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Ahmet Akkoç
Erwin Ernst eest9 Steinhammer
Carwil Bjork-James
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