Attitudes about Institutional Archiving of Social Media

This paper compares the results of two surveys that characterize attitudes about the institutional archives of two forms of public social media, Twitter tweets (i.e. microblog posts) and Flickr photos (i.e. shared visual media). Internet-savvy respondents were asked to assess three statements about a hypothetical scenario in which the Library of Congress archived and provided access to the social media in question. Access to the archives varied in three ways: (1) the public was given immediate access to the archive; (2) researchers were given immediate access to the archive; and (3) the public was given deferred access (by 50 years) to the archive. We found that access to photos was received best when it was deferred by 50 years, and access to tweets was received best when it was limited to researchers, hence suggesting that institutions pay careful attention to access limitations when they are seeking public acceptance of their archiving efforts. Introduction Social media, by its very nature, introduces questions about content ownership. Digital material is uploaded by individuals; it may document social or group events; it is shared with and commented on by an extended network of friends, family, and associates; and it is curated in practice through a combination of benign neglect and the uneven application of personal information management techniques. Yet increasingly people see services like Facebook as the first place to go to deposit and share socially meaningful personal artifacts, from everyday accounts of their lives to wedding pictures and online memorials. In fact, according to an IDC annual survey published in May, 2010, 70% of the world’s digital content is now created by individuals [1]. It is no wonder then that there is little resolution (beyond the obligatory End User License Agreements that users seldom read) about who owns—and, indeed, who is responsible for—the social media that is a vast and growing component of the Internet. End User License Agreements (EULAs) may even sidestep the matter. For example, Facebook’s EULA asserts: “You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook. This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it. ” (italics added by the authors) In other words, Facebook cannot really circumscribe the conditions under which their license holds, since users’ content may migrate into the purview of their friends. Content ownership comes into play most crucially when we design services and applications to archive, reuse, remix, or remove social media. We have been investigating social media ownership issues using a series of Mechanical Turk surveys that probe respondents' current attitudes and practices; the surveys combine open-ended questions about use with realistic scenarios that test respondents' attitudes in specific situations [2, 3]. One scenario we have included in our series of surveys poses questions about institutional archiving, since people may have difficulty meeting personal archiving challenges as individuals, and there may be social value (for example for historians, anthropologists, and other types of social scientists) in creating a more broadly accessible store of aggregated personal content. Specifically, we were interested in learning how respondents view real and hypothetical efforts by the Library of Congress to collect, store, and potentially provide access to personal media. Are people more cautious (or less cautious) about granting memory institutions the authority to archive their digital assets— for example, Twitter tweets, digital photos and videos, gamerelated materials and machinima, product reviews, or audio recordings—than they are individuals? If institutional archiving is implemented, who can see and use personal digital assets? Does time factor into more universal access, or should access be limited to historians and researchers? In this paper, we describe two studies we have performed to probe respondents’ reactions to institutional archiving of public Twitter microblogging content and public Flickr photos. We briefly discuss the method used to conduct the surveys and summarize the respondents’ demographic characteristics and how they compare to the larger population. Finally, we present and compare the results of the two surveys’ probes into this hypothetical institutional archiving effort. Method To perform this study, we sought respondents who were familiar with social media in general, and who were Internet-savvy without being part of the industry; the study population needed to be familiar with the particular type of social media in question. In the first survey, we screened for familiarity with (and participation in) Twitter, the microblogging service, and in the second survey, we screened for use of Flickr, or some equivalent digital photo sharing site. Mechanical Turk. We used documented best practices to implement the survey as a Mechanical Turk HIT (Human Intelligence Task). Mechanical Turk (MT) is an online labor marketplace wherein qualified workers accept online tasks; the service tracks worker identity (while concealing it, ensuring anonymity) and reliability. The general demographics of the MT community, including those of US-based workers, have been published elsewhere [4]. Mechanical Turk thus gave us access to a diverse, yet reliable, population of English-speaking respondents who had the desired demographic profile. Researchers have identified ways to test the validity of responses (e.g. through the use of a circumscribed number of reading comprehension questions [5]); we also made certain the respondents had spent a realistic amount of time on survey to answer the questions. Our methods for detecting fraudulent participation and for ensuring response quality are described in [2, 3]. The quality of responses to openended questions reassured us that the respondents took the questionnaires seriously and gave us confidence in the data we gathered this way. Survey structure. The two surveys we administered were structured in three parts. First we gathered basic demographic information, including two open-ended questions in which the participants told us what kind of activities they engaged in on the Internet, and what kind of materials they published and shared online. This information was useful in characterizing the respondents and comparing them with larger populations. The second part of both surveys presented the respondents with several realistic scenarios, and requested that they rate some statements about the scenarios on a 7-point Likert scale. These statements would enable us to assess their attitudes. In this paper, we focus on two equivalent hypothetical situations and the three associated statements that were presented in both surveys. Finally, the surveys (particularly the second survey about photo-sharing) included some questions about the respondents’ own practices. Although the first survey only included a modest number of these, respondents seemed more willing than we expected to answer this type of question, and to answer the questions expansively and—by some measure—authentically and candidly. Thus the second survey included many more questions of this sort. For the sake of brevity, we do not discuss this type of result here, but rather refer the interested reader to our other papers. Both surveys were deployed for two weeks. The microblogging survey garnered 190 responses, 173 of which passed our reliability tests, and the photo-sharing survey garnered 250 responses, 242 of which passed our reliability tests. Respondent characteristics. In both surveys, the participants were generally in their 20s and 30s (as we would expect, given our screening criteria, and the demographic profile of the MT service), although they ranged much more broadly. Like most surveys (and the service itself), females are slightly overrepresented in the microblogging survey (at 61%) and more so in the photo-sharing survey (at 72%). In both surveys, students made up about 1/3 of the respondents. The majority survey-takers had finished college, a characteristic which accurately reflects the composition of English-speaking Turkers. More than 1⁄2 of the survey population have more than 10 years of experience using the Internet, and almost all of the respondents have more than 7 years of Internet experience. Thus our participants are generally young (in their 20s and 30s), college educated, Internet savvy, but as we learned from the open-ended questions, represent a fairly diverse swath of the online population. The open-ended questions revealed an extensive range of types of social and individual Internet use. Individual uses included reading (e.g. news, blogs, websites); research (reflecting the respondents’ own interests and behalf of others); working (in addition to being Turkers, many respondents worked on independent projects and intellectual piece-work); shopping (including specific mention of sites such as Amazon, eBay, and the crafting site etsy); and consuming media (e.g. watch YouTube, TV, or movies). Social uses included participation in online communities (e.g. DeviantArt, TinierMe); social networking (especially Facebook); online gaming (including massively multiplayer online roleplaying games such as the World of Warcraft); and the use of communication tools such as Skype or chat programs. In summary, although the respondents are savvy, they are not dominated by a single interest or type of use. We were very much interested in this sort of diversity of purpose and interests. Privacy concerns. Our general open-ended questions about publishing and sharing (which did not include any direct questions about privacy) revealed that respondents had a variety of privacy concerns that arose organically. The responses range