Would you share your Fediverse data with researchers?
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
There was a lot of talk about data access at the #TSRC2024 today, so I'm curious.
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Nik | Klampfradler 🎸🚲replied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@evan I already do. All of it is public.
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@evan #Fediverse quo vadis ?
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@Hiker there were discussions at the Trust and Safety Research Conference this morning about access by researchers to personal social network data, and I wondered how people here thought about it. Does that help?
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krutor aka Simonreplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by@evan What kind of Data?
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Public statuses are already shared
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Evan Prodromoureplied to krutor aka Simon last edited by
@krutor good question! For me, it would be a lot different between my public posts and private ones. What about you?
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@evan
I still worry when data is to be “researched”. How do you define “researcher” here? For what purposes is “researched”? What are the limits and who determines them? Too many questions for 4 options. -
@Hiker if it depends on different factors, choose "qualified". If it's default yes, choose "qualified yes". If it's default no, choose "qualified no".
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@tassoman so, you think everyone who makes a public post has consented to participate in any and all research projects?
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@evan If it was on your poll list, I would choose "Not without my permission." If you do provide data to researchers, give us the option to Opt-In. Providing an explanation of the research requesting the data might be helpful too. I think people enjoy the Fediverse because it's more transparent than other platforms... so keep it this way.
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Manu :fediquebec:replied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@evan Rsearchers too needs cats pictures! ...
Seriously : Qualified no. -
Michael Vogelreplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by@evan The moment someone uses your data to get information, you go from being a user to being a product. I don't have problems with things like the number of users on a server, the number of posts on a server and things like that. But I really don't like anything that analyses the social graph (who interacts with whom and so on).
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Michael Vogel last edited by
@heluecht even for academic research?
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@JasonPester if *you* share it, isn't that permission?
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Manu :fediquebec: last edited by
@manu why qualified?
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Michael Vogelreplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@evan To use a famous quote: "I have a bad feeling about this".
Every observation influences the object being observed. Knowing that my interactions may be observed and analysed is likely to make me overthink my actions, because I would automatically try to behave in a way that would influence the outcome.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Michael Vogel last edited by
@heluecht last question: have you ever participated as a research subject before in another part of your life?
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@evan I don't view it that way. I choose to share content / data on platforms with an understanding of how that platform respects my rights to the content / data I post. Others have expressed a similar sentiment (see links below). I'm a straight male, but I think the author's point in the Medium article regarding LGBTQ+ outing through network data analysis is a good one.
More Mastodon Scraping Without Consent (Notes on Nobre et al 2022)
There’s a new paper out about Mastodon! But unfortunately, it’s a deeply problematic one. Nobre et al’s “More of the Same? A Study of Images Shared on Mastodon’s Federated Timeline” is a paper that is now published in proceedings from International Conference on Social Informatics. (Unfortunately, it’s not open access.) Because I’m currently researching the fediverse and blogging about that process, I thought I’d write up notes on this paper. Why this paper? Frankly, because I’m pretty certain it violates the community norms, as well as terms of service, of many Mastodon instances. It instantly reminded me of the controversial paper from Zignani et al, “Mastodon Content Warnings: Inappropriate Contents on a Microblogging Platform”, which resulted in a scathing open letter and the retraction of a dataset from the Harvard Dataverse. Nobre et al’s “More of the Same” is a study of image-sharing. The authors claim that it is about image-sharing on Mastodon, but really their focus is on images they culled from Mastodon.social’s federated timeline. They pulled 4M posts from 103K active users, of which 1M had images. Since they pulled posts from Mastodon.social’s federated timeline, they saw posts from 4K separate instances. The authors state that a “relevant number” of the images they found are “explicit.” They categorize the images as such after running them through Google’s Vision AI Safe Search system. They also run the images they find through Google’s image search to trace where the images came from and how they are shared on Mastodon. Ultimately, the authors don’t really make an argument, other than stating in passing that Mastodon needs better moderation, since people share explicit images. In some ways, “More of the Same” lives up to its title: it’s more of the same poor scholarship that can be seen in Zignani et al (in fact, Nobre et al cite that controversial paper). Here are my critiques:
FOSS Academic (fossacademic.tech)
Elasticsearch server actively scraping Mastodon user data; over 150,000 individuals exposed so far
If you’re a Twitter user, you’ve probably heard of Mastodon, a free open-source software with similar micro-blogging features.
Hot for Security (www.bitdefender.com)
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@JasonPester OK. I feel like the phrasing of the question suggests consent, but ok if you don't.