Hacker News Reader

Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

I found these statements by the associate department head interesting: https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/status/1384955467051454466

> I do work in Social Computing, and this situation is directly analogous to a number of incidents on Wikipedia quite awhile ago that led to that community and researchers reaching an understanding on research methods that are and are not acceptable.

and https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/status/1384966202301337603

> Yes! This was an IRB 'failure'. Again, in my area of Social Computing, it's been clear for awhile that IRBs often do not understand the issues and the potential risks/harms of doing research in online communities / social media.

An interesting question is IMHO who people actually tried to contact in the first round of this getting publicity (and I guess how many did so at all), and if leadership should thus have been aware earlier that there was controversy worth looking into.

View on HN

That whole twitter thread is really interesting, starting from https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/status/1384954220705722369

Yes Twitter is "weird" about with sub-thread it picks as the "main" one (well, it choses one and didn't pick the interesting one here), so I had to explicitly link the latter point.

Yeah, it gets even worse:

https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/13848713855379087...

That's shameful of the IEEE committee that approved the paper.

Absolutely. I think this is more of a failure of the IEEE Security and Privacy program committee (PC) than that of the university. The chairs should have desk rejected it on ethical grounds. Failing that, at least one of the reviewers should have noticed this was fishy and raised the alarm. And failing that, someone in the full PC meeting should have been like "whoa, hol up." (though this last failure could be partially explained with PC meetings now happening online instead of in person, so less engagement)

Basically now they can do a meta study on how the review process of IRB has flaws. As shown, if you intentionally try to bypass the IRB, apparently you can. It's even reproducible.

Oh so interesting ! In my french uni, psych teachers were all doing wikipedia research to prove it was unreliable by timing correction delay of purposedly introduced mistakes,

They were so proud of their discovery. They didnt think to time what that would take if they went to a printer and changed the text there before a book is printed.

Terveen was always honest about what works and what doesn't work. Its good to see them acknowledge that this is something they need to dive into and fix.

Note from the reader: said associate department head, Loren Terveen, is one of the two signers of the CS&E statement.

>it's been clear for awhile that IRBs often do not understand the issues and the potential risks/harms of doing research in online communities / social media.

Too bad he's not in a position of power to implement that additional review to CS department research.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com