Some Thoughts on Ethics and DocNow
One of the highest priorities for the DocNow project is to address the ethical issues around the collection, preservation, and sharing of social media content. While some of these issues can be handled by functionality built into the DocNow tool, others will have to be addressed through recommended practices we will develop during the project. I believe these recommended practices addressing ethics and social media archiving should be rooted in the core values we follow in our roles as archivists.
We’ve had some great discussions in the DocNow Slack channel recently about what these ethical issues are and ways we might address them. It’s been exciting to engage in dialogue with the wider community around these complicated questions. They’ve informed our work immeasurably and I hope more people join in the discussion.
The ethical considerations around social media archives are riddled with technical, theoretical, and practical complications, and the best way to tackle them is not to ignore the issues and take a “collect it all” approach, as some are advocating, but to address them head on and develop concrete solutions where possible or guidelines, best practices, and even a set of values where you can’t find solutions. One way I’ve been trying to think through some of these issues recently has been to consider the practices we’ve developed as archivists to address appraisal, ethics, privacy, etc, when working with donors of physical collections, and to imagine how those could transfer to social media archives.
Can some of these practices be transferred and used in the same way or will we have to rethink them a bit? For example, archivists mostly build collections for the long term. We want people to be able to find these archives ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, and our practices are developed with those considerations in mind. Can these same practices apply when addressing ethical issues for long term preservation of social media archives, especially considering that user consent to collect this type of data is a major ethical concern. I think there are some well developed practices we can explore that might help us think through this critical conversation.
Archivists have developed tools for protecting (ourselves) and donors of personal papers to our various collections and repositories. We’ve created the deed of gift, described by the Society of American Archivists as:
a formal and legal document between the donor and the repository that transfers ownership of and legal rights to the donated materials.
This is an absolutely key tool in our work as archivists. For example, the deed of gift a donor signs with the University of California at Riverside libraries where I work, is a contract between the donor and the Regents of the University of California. It’s a document that has to be vetted by the university’s general counsel before we can use it to bring collections into the library. These documents could be simple and relatively short or very complicated and extremely long. I’ve handled deed of gifts at other institutions that were more than twenty pages long because one thing that is allowed in these agreements is the opportunity for the donor to add several clauses. And those could address several things including how long the collection can be restricted to the public, who can access the collection, what parts of the collection can be made public and when, or what to do with potentially embarrassing information found in the collection.
Other requests include asking for collections to be digitized within a certain time frame, asking that the donor be allowed to come in whenever they want to see the collection, and requesting that the donor or their designee be the sole people allowed to grant permission to any researcher who wants to work with the collection. You get the idea. These documents can get complicated quickly and some of them are so restrictive that by the end of it you wonder if there’s any value in taking the collection in the first place. But regardless of how restrictive this process may be in some cases, what I appreciate about them is they give the donor an opportunity to make some decisions about how their legacy might be consumed by the public.
The deed of gift acknowledges the humanity of the individual or family donor, or the legitimacy of a corporation, by allowing them the opportunity to make some choices about how they will be represented. It’s a document that speaks to a donor’s existing privilege; but in some ways it can also give that privilege to a donor. It says we are dealing with each other in an equitable manner. The deed of gift is an acknowledgement that the donor owns the content and therefore can chose to give that content away on their owns terms. This is a protection for the person, business, or organization. It’s also a protection for the university and the repository receiving the collection, but in many cases it can create a more equal playing field. Or at least the illusion of it, because we know there are cases of libraries not holding up their end of the deed of gift agreement.
While almost laughable in it’s simplicity, the deed of gift between the Library of Congress and Twitter, the first such agreement for a collection of tweets, is an example of what can be included these types documents. In this case Twitter is the donor. Can we offer to the owners of social media archives, the same level of protections and recognition of privilege, the deed of gift gives to our traditional donors like Twitter or any other business, individual, or family? Why is the prevailing message around collecting social media one that says the information is publicly available so therefore we can take it? Ignoring how that practice can violate the users original intent and change the context of their posts based on how we make the collections available. Should archivists continue to treat social media archives like they have no owners when even Twitter acknowledges that users retain the rights to content in their tweets?
As the DocNow team continues to work through the ethics of collecting, preserving, and sharing social media archives, I think a good place to start framing some recommended practices for our future users can be to look at how we might transfer some of the protections afforded by the deed of gift for traditional collections to this new type of digital record.
The public will choose to do whatever they want when they have a tool in hand but I think imposing some restrictions on ourselves as users of DocNow or other social media archiving tools will be especially important in terms of protecting the people who will end up in the collections we build. For example, traditionally marginalized groups, including people or color, are some of the heaviest users of Twitter and other social media platforms. It’s important to consider transferring some of the protections we’ve developed for our mostly privileged (and white) donors of physical collections to these groups in this new digital collections space.
I’m not advocating for negotiating a deed of gift with every person represented in a social media collection because obviously these collections can number in the hundreds of thousands or millions. Even though I can see a deed of gift transferring really well if you wanted to collect the tweets of a single user, like say that of Patrisse Cullors, Deray McKesson, Antonio French, or Kayla Reed, for example.
What if you are assembling a collection in DocNow and are able to apply some deed of gift type restrictions to that collection? For example, an individual DocNow user you could decide to only keep tweet collections for a certain amount of time e.g., one, three or five years, after which the collection would be destroyed. Or the policy could be that collections would only be accessible after a five, ten or fifteen year moratorium. These types of restrictions can work well in cases where it might be difficult to obtain consent for a tweet collection. Another complementary lever at our disposal might be to allow users to indicate that they do not want to be represented in a collection — or to opt out, similar to what people are doing when they use a utility like TweetDelete. The challenge in this scenario will be letting people know that the data is even being collected in the first place.
How else can you see the deed of gift or other traditional tools or practices of archivists transferring to social media archives considering the unique challenges and opportunities these records pose? Let us know what you think in comments here on Medium or over in Slack.
