Social media ownership: using twitter as a window onto current attitudes and beliefs
Twitter Social Media Information Rights Survey Reuse
Authors: Catherine C Marshall, Frank M Shipman
Year: 2011
Published in: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems..
Read me: DOI: 10.1145/1978942.1979103.
Abstract: Social media, by its very nature, introduces questions about ownership. Ownership comes into play most crucially when we investigate how social media is saved or archived; how it is reused; and whether it can be removed or deleted. We investigate these social media ownership issues using a Mechanical Turk survey of Twitter users; the survey uses open-ended questions and statements of belief about realistic Twitter-based scenarios to give us a window onto current attitudes and beliefs. Our findings reveal that respondents take a liberal attitude toward saving and storing the tweets that they encounter. More caution is exercised with republishing the material, and still more with sharing the material among friends and associates. Respondents approach removal of this type of lightweight social media most cautiously. The material's provenance and the respondents' relationship to the material (whether they are the author or subject) has considerable bearing on what they feel they can do with it.
Bibtex (copy):@inproceedings{marshall2011social,
title={Social media ownership: using twitter as a window onto current attitudes and beliefs},
author={Marshall, Catherine C and Shipman, Frank M},
booktitle={Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
pages={1081--1090},
year={2011}
}Annotation
By Rover van der Noort, Martijn Smits, Remy Duijsens, Dajt Mullaj. 🪧Slides.
Summary
Social media has significantly simplified the process of sharing information all around the world. However, it also introduces concerns about the ownership of this information. A study conducted by the authors examined the attitude of frequent Twitter users towards these issues.
To accomplish this objective the authors surveyed the participants. In the survey, the participant expresses their attitude towards several different scenarios. The scenarios are designed to investigate three main topics introduced in the paper: saving tweets, reusing tweets and deleting tweets. In each scenario the participant answers multiple questions regarding the aforementioned topics.
The authors present their findings in five different categories. The first category is ownership and control. The authors found that most participants felt that Twitter users should be able to store their own Twitter conversations. And, although the reaction was less convincing, the majority of the people also seem to agree that someone should be able to store tweets from other people. The second category is publication versus sharing. The distinction between the two is the audience of the content. Publication means that the content is available on the open web while sharing means that the content is available to people within social spheres. Interestingly, the authors found that people are more positive towards publication than sharing. The third category is reusing and remixing content. Most of the participants had a positive attitude towards reusing media. However, the reuse of media without crediting the creator scored significantly lower than the reuse with crediting the creator. The fourth category is removing content. The attitudes of the participants were mixed in the case of Twitter users being able to remove content that was featuring them as a subject. While the majority of the participants agreed that a user should not be able to take down tweets that were only partly about them. The fifth category was about institutional ownership. The participants had varying opinions on the archiving of the entire Twitter database. However, the attitude towards restricted access was more positive than open access.
In the conclusion the authors discuss the implications of the findings. First, they question how attitude should affect the design of collaborative spaces. Next, they question the boundaries of storing information. Finally, they wonder how joint-ownership determines the future of social media. The authors propose more research towards the topic, for instance to see how the findings compare to other social media.
Critical Analysis
In order to make sure that the participants were sufficiently familiar with Twitter, the authors decided to select only frequent Twitter users to participate in the study. We assume that nowadays almost everyone has at least some understanding of social media, such as Twitter. Therefore we think that also including participants that do not have Twitter or have deleted their account could increase the value of the research because social media ownership can affect them as well.