TO SCREENSHOT OR NOT TO SCREENSHOT? TENSIONS IN REPRESENTING VISUAL SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM POSTS

Abstract

The rise to prominence of visual social media platforms (VSMPs) including TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube has led to increasing amounts of research attention directed to these platforms. As research engages multimodal platforms, representing their content (including text, audio, image, and video components) increasingly becomes both important and complex. The AoIR Internet Research Ethics (IRE) 3.0 guidelines stipulate that “we need to elaborate an ethics addressing the distinctive issues clustering around the production, sharing, and thereby research on visual images” (franzke et al., 2020). In this paper, we begin making such an elaboration, describing considerations necessary when representing screenshots. We provide an overview of four current approaches to representing VSMP posts and annotate their tensions.