Hostile responses to research on online communities: how can we safeguard researchers?

Half-day workshop

Suggested audience Researchers and research managers involved in the study of online communities. All levels of experience and expertise welcomed.

Workshop aims To discuss the risks involved when researchers study potentially hostile online communities and identify steps that research institutions can put in place to safeguard them

We are researchers at the University of Nottingham conducting a project on practices for effective, safe and responsible research on online communities. Our project is called ‘EFRESH’ and is being conducted in collaboration with the Internet Society. We believe that online communities are an essential topic of research focus. These communities provide a digital space for users with shared interests to meet. Researching how they are formed and organised helps us understand contemporary phenomena such as (online) identity formation, collective discourses and action, and the spread of (mis)information.

However, researchers in this area increasingly report experiencing a hostile response when researching online communities. This particularly occurs when the communities being studied share extreme/outsider viewpoints or behaviours – for instance, white supremacist groups, conspiracy theorist groups, cheating forums for online gamers, COVID denial forums etc. Members of these communities may react negatively to awareness of being studied and undertake actions such as:

• sending abusive/threatening messages to the researcher and/or the researcher’s family members;
• sharing personal information about the researcher online (doxing);
• creating embarrassing Photoshopped images of the researcher and sharing them online;
• making complaints to the researcher’s university;
• posting false information about the researcher online.

These actions are most likely to occur during data collection and the dissemination of findings. They are also most likely to occur in environments in which negative behaviours are normalised. Some platforms (e.g. Kiwi Farms, 4chan) have reputations for minimal content moderation and some communities incorporate the harassment of outsiders as part of their group identity. Junior researchers, female researchers, researchers of colour, and researchers in the LGBTQIA+ community are most vulnerable to these kinds of hostile responses. Experiencing them can cause psychological trauma and fatigue, as well as reputational damage. They can also delay the research and publication process, potentially harming researchers’ career progression.

The presence of these risks means it is necessary to safeguard researchers when they study online communities. Current literature shows that at present, researchers and research groups are often required to develop their own strategies for this, with little organised input or support from research institutions. In this interactive workshop we will explore steps we are taking in a current project to address this current absence of institutional-level support.

Using a range of research activities, we seek to identify best practices for researcher safeguarding during this research, particularly emphasising the need for institutions to acknowledge the extent of the problem and develop proactive strategies to protect researchers. We will use our findings to prepare safeguarding guidance to share across research institutions.

We welcome all researchers and research managers with an interest in this issue to join this workshop. We want to share our project findings with the internet research community in order to receive feedback on them and maximise the contribution they can make. The workshop will be highly interactive. We will present our emerging findings and draft institutional guidance and open them up for discussion. Break-out discussions will provide an opportunity to identify improvements to the guidance and strategies to promote their adoption across research institutions. We will also assess interest in a creating a joint report on the workshop for publication.

Proposed workshop outline

• Introductions, project overview, workshop overview
• Small group discussion activity: risks involved in the study of online communities. The scope and scale of the problem
• Presentation: project findings and draft guidance
• Small group discussion activity: reflecting on the guidance. What can be improved and what can be added?
• Plenary discussion: how can we encourage research institutions to acknowledge the issue and put appropriate safeguarding in place? Next steps for progress in this area.