Collecting migrants' Facebook posts: Accounting for ethical measures in a text-as-data approach

Abstract

Based on the heuristics proposed by Helen Nissenbaum to assess ethical issues surrounding research using new technologies, this paper discusses the ethics of the collection and analysis of migrants' digital traces for academic research purposes. Concretely, this paper is grounded on an empirical research that applies a topic modeling approach to a large dataset of migrants' posts written on Facebook groups. After discussing the nine aspects proposed by Nissenbaum, the paper contends that while researchers strive to comply with ethical measures by, for instance, asking adequate questions and protecting the collected data, the lack of transparency of social networking sites is harmful to critical social sciences and can hamper findings that contribute to understanding migratory patterns and decisions.