Advice forums

Should I disguise online sources by eliding usernames and altering quotations?

Advice about health and relationships are sensitive topics, even if shared in public via pseudonyms.

What’s the word?

• anonymizing (Ohm (2010))
• fabricating (Markham (2012))
• de-identifying (HaimsonAndalibiPater (2016))
• UnGoogling (ShklovskiVertesi (2013))
• obfuscating (BruntonNissenbaum (2015))
• disguising (Bruckman (2002))

Disguise (Bruckman (2002))

light

identify forum, change usernames; “verbatim quotes may be used, even if they could be used to identify an individual… an outsider could probably figure out who is who with a little investigation.”

heavy

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.”

moderate

“a compromise position … as appropriate”

Following…

• 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.

Research reports

• 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.

Searching Reddit

Reddit

provides searching of all posts, but not comments, via the website’s search bar and the Application Programming Interface (API).

Google

indexes all of Reddit, which is especially useful for finding comments. Google searches can be narrowed by way of the time and site fields.

Pushshift.io (RedditSearch UI)

is a third-party index of Reddit. It indexes posts and comments and provides many search fields via its API, including time ranges

Interviews

• Three researchers consented to speak with me.
• We discussed their practice, rationale, influences, and thoughts about my efforts.

Ethics

Though I used public research reports and their own Reddit sources in my analysis, none of this is identified or quoted.

Search tools

• Reddit is excellent at finding verbatim content from a post but does not support searching for the comments that follow a post.
• Google can search posts and comments and was useful for non-exact (non-quoted) searches.
• RedditSearch, a human-friendly interface for Pushshift’s index and API, is the most potent tool, enabling sophisticated searches and maintaining copies of messages that have since been edited or deleted.

Efficacy of disguise