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1. Michael Veale (mikarv@someone.elses.computer)'s status on Thursday, 02-Feb-2023 19:48:26 JST Michael Veale

   Twitter closing API access will drive the (questionable) study of social media posts to places like Mastodon. Classes that were teaching people social media scraping will likely turn to ActivityPub services. However, university #researchEthics committees should be wary of approving research as before. Unlike Twitter, instances and users can (and do) have much clearer views on being scraped. People can be contacted more easily for ethical consent in open protocols. Not a free for all any more.

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Thursday, 02-Feb-2023 19:55:08 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @mikarv Thanks for the reminder. I just adding the following clause to my bio:

     My posts are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

     #fediverse #posts #licensing #creativeCommons #scraping

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Friday, 03-Feb-2023 03:04:31 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • varx/social

     @varx @mikarv I’ll take that too :)

   • varx/social (varx@cybersecurity.theater)'s status on Friday, 03-Feb-2023 03:04:32 JST varx/social

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan

     @aral @mikarv Copyright is largely orthogonal to academic scraping.

     It's only relevant if the data will be republished, performed, etc. to any substantial degree. Aggregate stats? Won't apply. And they can still use it under fair use in various ways.

     Copyright is the wrong tool for this. What you want is a standard that allows instances (or actually, users) to publish metadata saying whether scraping is OK.