Big-but-intimate data

Reddit is the most vital manifestation of the centuries-old advice genre.

• r/relationship_advice and r/AmItheAsshole, for example, hold the intimate conundrums of tens of thousands,
• are discussed by hundreds of thousands and seen by an audience of millions.

Scholars face methodological and ethical challenges that scholars of print advice columns never faced (Graham et al. 2015; Milligan 2019).

Public quasi-sensitive disclosures

People share in public forums what would be sensitive elsewhere about their health, work, and relationships.

I call these public quasi-sensitive disclosures—hereafter, disclosures.

They are not sensitive in a regulatory or IRB sense, and there are no research subjects—but reporting them still merits care.

Risks of reporting on disclosures

• Consequential harm: third parties act on reported disclosures to a source’s detriment (e.g., a report of taboo or illegal activity prompting government, employer, or family response). Possible, but I know of no such case happening from research reports.
• Affective harm: the more probable negative feelings when a source sees their words reported and discussed outside the original context (Nissenbaum 2004; Klassen & Fiesler 2022).

Ask for consent before using?

A Reddit post about a failed paternity test turns into a case of babies switched at birth. It also prompts discussion of advice hoaxes, a topic of your research.

“The data is already public”

Most advice-genre scholarship and Reddit research presume the data is public and freely usable.

Yet, this stance often fails to “remember the human” behind online disclosures (Zimmer 2010; Fiesler et al. 2024) and that users, even when disguised by the researchers, might object to the use of their public posts (Morant et al. 2021).

Care in Selection & Reporting (CSR)

CSR plots a course between two extremes:

• that all such data is public and usable without constraint, and
• that consent must be obtained from every source.

This approach complements ethically disguising sources (Bruckman 2002), a valuable but error-prone technique (Reagle 2022).

A spectrum of practice

• Major gravity → avoided, or alluded to without excerpt or citation.
• Moderate gravity, not widely distributed → disguised in both source and prose.
• Updated, old, throwaway, widely distributed → excerpted and cited.
• Significantly excerpted prose → warrants asking the OP for objection.

Structured annotations

I track provenance and treatment with embedded HTML comments in my markdown manuscripts:

<!-- ethics: c:[[case]] d:[[date]] g:[[gravity]] i:[[identity]] p:[[prose]] s:[[syndicated]] u:[[updated]] r:[[responded]] n:[[note]] -->

A mild, eleven-year-old conundrum about a camping trip, from a throwaway who updated, and that was syndicated offsite, and whom I never contacted would be:

<!-- ethics: c:camping d:old g:mild i:throwaway p:verbatim s:yes u:yes r:na n:na -->

These never appear in the finished manuscript, but are easy to track and analyze.

Excerpted conundrums

Among these Redditors whose disclosures I substantively excerpt and whom I cite without disguise,

• three never responded (from dated throwaway accounts);
• one was a probable hoaxer and never responded;
• one did not object to inclusion and declined an interview;
• one did not object to inclusion but ghosted me on an interview;
• one did not object to inclusion, and I didn’t ask for an interview.

Disguised citations

Disguised sources have both a proper bibliographic entry and a corresponding disguised citation.

The manuscript then yields undated citations such as:

Disguised_OP, “Gaslighting (Disguised Post),” Reddit.

Careful selection and reporting offers scholars a way to use public quasi-sensitive disclosures.

A middle path between the extremes of:

1. wantonly reporting disclosures, and
2. being inappropriately encumbered by requirements rightly reserved for actual human-subjects research.

Questions?