Developing a social media archive, however, requires first and foremost a careful consideration of the legal and ethical landscape within which such collections are created, managed, and made accessible. This means considering and assessing regulatory aspects, including copyright, data protections laws and terms of service of social media platforms.

Key legal concerns to consider when collecting social media

Ownership of Data and Copyright Concerns

Ascertaining the ownership of content shared on social media, even with relative certainty, can be extremely challenging due to the stratification of stakeholders who may generate and share content, including attached media such as videos, images, and audio recordings. It is also important to note that, when signing up to platforms, users often pay little attention to terms of service without fully considering their implications. Many of these agreements state that, although users retain ownership of the content they create, by posting or submitting material they grant platforms, such as X.com, a “non-exclusive, royalty-free licence […] to use, copy, reproduce, […] display and distribute such content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed.”¹ Such provisions add an additional layer of complexity to questions of ownership of data and raise significant ethical concerns, particularly given that users may be unaware of how their content can be used by third parties.

Moreover, archivists should consider that intellectual property rights may apply to social media on a two-pronged level: the creator who generates the content and the company who owns, for example, the design of the interface and logo. As web archiving practices consist of producing copies of websites which are then replayed via specific access interfaces,² this may raise concerns when the act of web archiving involves copyrighted material for which archiving initiatives may have not received explicit authorisation from the author. In some countries, institutions may benefit from specific copyright exemptions allowing them to capture content for preservation purposes.³ However, such exemptions often come with restriction on modalities of access, (re)use of data and reproduction of web archived material, which may hinder engagement with web and social media collections.⁴

Data Protection Laws

For archives and libraries “archiving in the public interest”, Article 89 of the GDPR provides specific exemptions. However, appropriate safeguards must be put in place to protect the data subjects’ rights, such as anonymization and minimization. Nevertheless, due to the sheer volume of data generated on social media platforms, even when applying all due precautions at the selection stage, it is important to take into account that some sensitive or personal information may inadvertently be captured when archiving at scale.

Social media policies

Social media policies impose a set of limitations on collection activities in order to protect primarily their legitimate commercial interests. These include, for example, restrictions on the amount of data that can be accessed in a specific timeframe via platforms’ official APIs, as well as systems designed to detect behaviour patterns that could be attributed to web crawlers. While web scraping is somewhat legal, the risk of infringing platforms Terms & Conditions may still persist when not explicitly allowed by the platform itself.⁵

In addition, as these policies tend to change rather rapidly and unexpectedly, collecting institutions need to continuously adapt and develop new approaches to effectively collect content from these platforms.

Conclusions: recommendations and strategies to mitigate concerns

In light of the, albeit brief, overview of challenges outlined above, social media archiving initiatives must consider adopting transparent and well-documented approaches to social media collection development and access. Every decision taken in response to legal constraints and ethical concerns should be clearly recorded and made available to users of the resulting collections, enabling them to critically engage with the material.

To mitigate privacy or copyright concerns, for example, permission-based approaches have proved to be a widely implemented strategy across community of practice. However, the time-consuming process of seeking permission to archive social media content is only feasible for small scale archiving projects. The sheer volume of data generated daily on social media, combined with its interconnected nature, makes it impractical to seek permission at scale, particularly given the limited resources available to many cultural heritage institutions to effectively support such endeavour.

Where possible, institutions should assess archived content for the presence of sensitive or personal information upon collection/donation. However, given the scale of many social media collections, item-level review may not always be feasible. In such cases, good practice includes the use of collection-level disclaimers to warn users about the potential presence of sensitive material. Limiting access to social media collections to vetted or accredited researchers, can offer an additional layer of risk mitigation.

Finally, following the example set by several web archiving institution, implementing a well-defined takedown procedure, including for example a list of clear criteria under which content may be removed from access (ideally developed in collaboration with in-house legal teams or under external advice), can help ensure transparency and further mitigate ethical and legal concerns.