People’s perceptions on social media archiving by the National Library of Japan

Abstract

Social media content can be considered an unprecedented historical resource that reflects present-day ordinary life. However, although private data are publicly available on social media, the preserving of such personal content by a third party entails legal and ethical concerns. We report on a nationwide questionnaire survey conducted to obtain the responses of people to hypothetical scenarios of social media archiving by the National Diet Library in Japan. Within our survey sample, 35% of respondents (n = 1126) disagreed with scenarios involving the preserving of blogs and public tweets. Moreover, we found that the agreement rate for the archiving of government websites already collected under the current legislation was 44%. Ordered logistic analysis clarified that privacy-sensitive respondents tend to resist archival scenarios, and content analysis showed that the disagreement reasons involve concerns over information privacy. Our findings suggest that informed consent and data anonymisation could be effective means to mitigate such concerns.