Disguising Reddit sources and the efficacy of ethical research

Joseph Reagle

2021-05-07

Disguise

light, moderate and …

disguise: false details; no verbatim quotes if a “search mechanism could link those quotes to the person in question… someone deliberately seeking to find a subject’s identity would likely be unable to do so.” (Bruckman (2002))

King (1996) faulted FinnLavitt (1994) for disguising sources’ names, but not that of the sexual abuse forum or the date and time of posts.
Zimmer (2010) critiqued researchers for creating a “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook dataset that was improperly — perhaps impossibly — “anonymized.”
BarbaroZeller (2006) reported on — and confirmed — the potential to locate sources in an AOL dataset.
Singer (2015), wanting to speak to a source in a research study, was able to identify, contact, and interview the source.

Looked for Reddit research from past five years using keywords such as “privacy,” “verbatim,” “fabrication,” and “AoIR guidelines.”
Found three reports using verbatim phrases and three using reworded phrases.
Attempted to locate Redditors’ phrases in the six reports with Reddit, Google, and RedditSearch/Pushshift.

Three researchers consented to speak with me.
We discussed their practice, rationale, influences, and thoughts about my efforts.
Though I used public research reports and their own Reddit sources in my analysis, none of this is identified or quoted.

report	approach	sources	located	note
V1	verbatim	18	17	`-` leaked non-throwaway accounts
V2	verbatim	17	15	`-` didn’t account for deleted posts
V3	verbatim	6	6	`-` inconsistent description/practice
R1	reworded	2	0	`+` preferred interviews to posts
R2	reworded	5	5	`-` posts found via thread title
R3	reworded	8	0	`+` disguises tested by researchers