Unwinding a Legal and Ethical Ariadne’s Thread Out of the Twitter Scraping Maze

Social media data is a gold mine for research scientists, but such type of data carries unique legal and ethical implications while there is no checklist that can be followed to effortlessly comply with all the applicable rules and principles. On the contrary, academic researchers need to find their way in a maze of regulations, sectoral and institutional codes of conduct, interpretations and techniques of compliance. Taking an autoethnographic approach combined with desk research, we describe the path we have paved to find the answers to questions such as: what counts as personal data on Twitter and can it be anonymized? How may we inform Twitter users of an ongoing data collection? Is their informed consent necessary? This article reports practical insights on ethical, legal, and technical measures that we have adopted to scrape Twitter data and discusses some solutions that should be envisaged to make the task of compliance less daunting for academic researchers. The subject matter is relevant for any social computing research activity and, more in general, for all those that intend to gather data of EU social media users.