Naiyan Jones

Reddit is one of the world's most prominent social media platforms, and also a valuable source of data for internet researchers. However, working with this kind of data also presents novel ethical complications for researchers, including issues around privacy, vulnerable populations, and unintended consequences. This paper describes an analysis of 134 papers that rely on Reddit data while also including some discussion of ethical implications and/or considerations by the researchers. Our analysis of these papers reveals common ethical issues and ethically motivated methodological decisions, as described by the researchers themselves, while also exposing some gaps for further ethical contemplation for researchers relying on Reddit data. Based on these findings, we close with a set of recommendations for ethically-informed methods and reflection for researchers working with social data.

This article offers a systematic analysis of 727 manuscripts that used Reddit as a data source, published between 2010 and 2020. Our analysis reveals the increasing growth in use of Reddit as a data source, the range of disciplines this research is occurring in, how researchers are getting access to Reddit data, the characteristics of the datasets researchers are using, the subreddits and topics being studied, the kinds of analysis and methods researchers are engaging in, and the emerging ethical questions of research in this space. We discuss how researchers need to consider the impact of Reddit’s algorithms, affordances, and generalizability of the scientific knowledge produced using Reddit data, as well as the potential ethical dimensions of research that draws data from subreddits with potentially sensitive populations.