Marco Wähner, Annika Deubel, Johannes Breuer and Katrin Weller recently published an article in the journal “Publizistik” that deals with the ethical challenges of using data from the decentralised social network Mastodon. The article, entitled “‘Don’t research us’-How Mastodon instance rules connect to research ethics”, examines how the rules of Mastodon instances address the scientific use of their data.
Mastodon is a decentralised social network that has recently gained popularity due to the changes in Twitter (now X). The technical structure of such a decentralised network has not only methodological but also ethical implications for data collection and analysis. Mastodon consists of a large number of individual instances (about 17,000), each of which has its own rules that may also affect the handling of data.
The study focussed on active instances with English-language rules. The results, based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis, show that only a small proportion of instances mention the scientific use of their data. Instead, most of the rules focus more on the behaviour and interactions of the users. Based on these results, the authors formulate recommendations for researchers who want to work with Mastodon data. These recommendations are guided both by the empirical results of the study and by general ethical principles for the study of social media data.
The article has been published open access in the special issue “The Interplay of Methodology and Research Ethics in Communication and Media Research” and can be accessed here.
Article: Wähner, M., Deubel, A., Breuer, J., Weller, K.: “Don’t research us”-How Mastodon instance rules connect to research ethics. Publizistik (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11616-024-00855-6