A new study out of the University of Colorado has found that the majority of Twitter users don’t know that researchers freely collect and analyze their tweets — even those that have been deleted — in the name of science.
The study, in which CU researchers were joined by partners at the University of Kentucky, also found that most people believe such a practice shouldn’t be permitted without their consent, and wrongly think that it represents a violation of Twitter’s service terms.
“There is a ton of research right now using Twitter and other social media data,” lead author Casey Fiesler, an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science at CU, said in a news release. “Yet our study found that the majority of users may not even be aware that this is a thing that happens.”
Fiesler and co-author Nicholas Proferes, an assistant professor at Kentucky, surveyed 268 Twitter users, average age 32. The average participant had posted about 2,000 tweets and followed approximately 350 people.
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