At the international Social Media & Society Conference in London (16-18 July 2024), Marco Wähner will present the study “Beyond Twitter: Data Ethics in the Decentralised Social Media Landscape. The Case of Mastodon Instance Rules”. This study, conducted by Wähner, Deubel, Breuer and Weller, examines how Mastodon instance rules regulate the use of data for research purposes and what implications this has for research ethics.
The acquisition of Twitter (now X) by Elon Musk in October 2022 led to an increase in users seeking alternative platforms, contributing to the rapid growth of the decentralised microblogging network Mastodon. Unlike Twitter/X, Mastodon operates on a federated model within the so-called ‘fediverse’, which allows independent entities to communicate with each other. This growth has also fuelled research interest in Mastodon.
While Twitter/X has recently discontinued free data access for academic research via its API, Mastodon offers a free and well-documented API. However, Mastodon’s decentralised structure poses conceptual challenges for researchers and raises new ethical questions. Unlike commercial platforms, Mastodon does not have universal terms of use, which makes regulating data access complex. Initial empirical evidence suggests that Mastodon users prioritise data privacy more than users of other platforms, which needs to be taken into account when conducting research on Mastodon (Lee & Wang, 2023; Nicholson et al., 2023).
The study comprehensively collected all Mastodon instance rules written in English (4,371 by 05/2023) using the Mastodon API. The empirical results were used to formulate recommendations for researchers interested in Mastodon data.
Further information and the full conference programme can be found here.