The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Ari Stillman, whose interest is in Reddit data analysis. Historically, Reddit has provided data on activities on the platform quite openly; its leaders had been strongly committed to open access and data sharing, but this changed substantially some 1.5 years ago when Reddit restricted its API, however.
This caused outrage in the user community, and especially amongst the unpaid community moderator workforce who relied substantially on API access to automate some aspects of their work. Following highly controversial debate, Reddit promised a Reddit 4 Researchers programme, yet this has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, other researchers shared archival Reddit data dumps and continue to scrape the Website, which causes other significant problems.
One way to address this is to return back to more qualitative research methods that do not require extensive programmatic data access; this might require clear identification as a researcher when entering a subreddit, and responsiveness to the needs and responses of the subreddit community. Further direct outreach to specific users is also possible, using approved ethical mechanisms for doing so.
There is also a need to revisit scholarly ethics rules, however, and especially query how they engage with platforms’ Terms of Service, which are often overreaching and designed to frustrate any meaningful, critical, investigative research that is in then public interest. Media and platform companies should be treated as potentially bad actors, and this may serve as an argument for ignoring Terms of Service altogether; this does not mean ignoring ethical obligations, however, but simply takes an anti-capitalist approach to ethics.
Some recent research on Reddit failed to follow such imperatives: researchers misrepresented themselves to participants, did not inform participants of their manipulations, and failed to follow the declared rules of the subreddits they studied. This does not mean that all research on Reddit is unethical, however.
