follow up on research ethics implications of Twitter's 'general amnesty'

14 May 2024 - 2 minutes read - 320 words - kudos:

This is just a few words to say that this post that I wrote back in December 2022 has suddenly become relevant.

In short, some of my recent work has been on an online Mormon community that has some overlaps with the far-right. In between my collection of the data and eventual publication of our various articles, my co-author and I have noted some prominent accounts’ being suspended from Twitter. Because we work hard to not use identifiable quotes in our writing, and because of Elon Musk’s decision to unsuspend nearly all suspended accounts after taking the platform over, I’ve been checking accounts I knew to previously be suspended as we work on a new manuscript. Today, for the first time, I’ve found one account that has indeed been unsuspended.

I don’t know the specific reasons the account originally got suspended, so I’m not here to comment on Musk’s decision as such—as I wrote before, I’m mostly interested here in whether the unsuspension will have effects on my efforts to not use identifiable quotes. If our previous paper was written while this account was suspended, we may have felt more free to use direct quotes from the account with confidence that we were doing no harm. Have any of those quotes been restored along with the account, thereby thwarting our efforts to protect our research subject?

As far as I can tell, no? Using Twitter’s advanced search, I can’t find any evidence that the unsuspended account has tweeted any of the content that we’ve collected in our data. I’m not sure if that means content wasn’t restored with the account, if 2019 is too long ago for Twitter advanced search to pick up on, or if anything else is going on. At any rate, it continues to be interesting (and, more often than not, frustrating) to note how Musk’s management of the platform is changing what Twitter research looks like.

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