I have a chapter in the recently published De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Political Communication. Many thanks to the fantastic editors, Mark Wheeler and & Petros Iosifidis for the invitation, and for pulling together such an excellent volume.

My chapter is entitled ‘Ethical Dilemmas in Researching Sousveillance on YouTube Revisited’.

The abstract can be read below:

The socio-technical affordances of online platforms like YouTube enable citizens to distribute sousveillance (or inverse surveillance) footage, focusing attention on police brutality, to a potential global audience. This undoubtedly creates new opportunities for qualitative researchers exploring the role of social media in contemporary protest and social movements, but it also presents a series of ethical dilemmas to be addressed. Most notably, scholars must consider the feasibility and desirability of seeking informed consent from those uploading and commenting on these videos. This requires some engagement with the merits of the so-called ‘fair game’ defence, namely that publicly available social media data can be used without ethical considerations due to the fact that users should be aware of such data collection courtesy of the terms of service of each platform. In this paper, I consider what measures, if any, should be taken to protect those who comment on social media sousveillance. I do so by revisiting the ethical approach taken during a previous study of how YouTube was used to share sousveillance footage, namely the 2011 ‘Battle of Stokes Croft’ in Bristol, England. I reflect on whether a different stance might be taken if this research was to be conducted in the contemporary era. I argue that sousveillance researchers should focus on what is said online rather than who says it. 

The book can be purchased online and you can read a preprint of my chapter here.