Conversation

Twitter closing API access will drive the (questionable) study of social media posts to places like Mastodon. Classes that were teaching people social media scraping will likely turn to ActivityPub services. However, university #researchEthics committees should be wary of approving research as before. Unlike Twitter, instances and users can (and do) have much clearer views on being scraped. People can be contacted more easily for ethical consent in open protocols. Not a free for all any more.