Josh Williams as photographed by Jamelle Bouie on the Documenting the Now homepage

Documenting the Now Ethics White Paper

by Bergis Jules and Ed Summers

Through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation the Documenting the Now project has had the opportunity to explore the ethical issues that arise from archiving social media, with specific focus on social media content created by participants in the recent wave of African-American activism in response to police shootings.

A significant part of this work included reflecting on our many conversations on these issues over the past two years in a white paper that provides background and discussion of the ethical considerations for archiving social media content generated by contemporary social movements, including the challenges and opportunities for archivists, and initial recommendations for moving forward. This post is a brief introduction to this white paper which you can now also read in full:

Ethical Considerations for Archiving Social Media Content Generated by Contemporary Social Movements: Challenges, Opportunities, and Recommendations

For archivists and scholars interested in archiving or research that involves social media content, the Internet affords the luxury of a certain amount of distance to be able to observe people, consume information generated by and about them, and collect their data without having to participate in equitable engagement as a way to understand their lives, communities, or concerns. At the same time, the public’s use of these social media platforms to document events of historical significance, engage in political conversations, or share and explore personal and cultural experiences, continues to grow even as that same public remains unaware of how their data is being used.

Challenges

Preserving web and social media content in ethical ways that protect already marginalized people presents several challenges:

1. Lack of user awareness (or informed consent) of how social media platforms use their data or how it can be collected and accessed by third parties.
2. Potential for fraudulent use and manipulation of social media content.
3. Heightened potential of harm for members of marginalized communities when those individuals participate in activities such as protests and other forms of civil disobedience that are traditionally heavily monitored by law enforcement.
4. Difficulty of applying traditional archival practices to social media content given the sheer volume of data and complicated logistics of interacting with content creators.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the issues that archivists must grapple with as they attempt to work with social media content, but they are the specific concerns that arose for Documenting the Now as we engaged with researchers, archivists, journalists, activists to understand how we could work to document the recent wave of African-American activism.

In addition to our Slack channel which allowed us to connect with web archiving practitioners from around the world, we also convened several in person focused meetings Documenting the Now Symposium (2017), Digital Blackness in the Archive (2018) and the Ethics and Archiving the Web (2018) that was held in collaboration with Rhizome with support from the Institute for Museum and Library Services. These engagements allowed us to understand emerging practices around social media archiving, and how best to meet them in our own tool development.

Recommendations

While we remain engaged in the development of a community of practice concerned with social media archiving, we also took stock of these conversations in order to make some recommendations for social media archiving work going forward. We welcome continued conversation on these issues here on Medium, in our Slack channel or out in Twitter.

1. Archivists must engage and work with the communities they wish to document on the web. Archives are often powerful institutions. Attention to the positionality of the archive vis-à-vis content creators, particularly in the case of protest, is a prime consideration that can guide efforts at preservation and access.
2. Documentation efforts must go beyond what can be collected without permission from the web and social media. Social media collected with the consent of content creators can form a part of richer documentation efforts that include the collection of oral histories, photographs, correspondence, and more. Simply telling the story of what happens in social media is not enough, but it can be a beginning.
3. Archivists should follow social media platforms’ terms of service only where they are congruent with the values of the communities they are attempting to document. What is legal is not always ethical, and what is ethical is not always legal. Context, agency and (again) positionality matter.
4. When possible, archivists should apply traditional archival practices such as appraisal, collection development, and donor relations to social media and web materials. It is hard work adapting these concepts to the collection of social media content, but they matter now, more than ever.

Again these aren’t meant to be a complete list of the issues that are of concern when archiving social media content. But they were the issues that surfaced the most in our work that was focused on the records of Black protest movements of the past few years. If this introduction piques your interest we encourage you to read the full report, and (please) let us know what you think.

Onward!