[angrais]

What are you talking about? Why wouldn't an IRB approve of this "research"? Also, IRBs are not the panacea for how research should be done. They're designed to protect the university legally more than to protect participants from harm.

Regarding designing or using sociotechical systems like Twitter, see Brown et al. (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2858036.2858313) for good discussion and provocations on why this is the case.

[uberman]

Part of the reason for IRBs is of course to protect the institution. The other is to protect the subjects. I also don't recall saying that IRB review was some sort of "panacea". Please don't present clearly false claims like that.

Any real IRB board would see that this research clearly contains potential harmful outcomes to participants as a result of making public examples of them for the researcher's amusement. No ethical researcher "publishes" results without some attempt to shield the identities of the subjects. Sure, sometimes they screw that up, but revealing the identities of "researched stooges" seems to have been the primary intent here.

I must obtain IRB approval to conduct any research, even show people simple web/social content. Sometimes it is fast tracked for sure, but EVERYTHING that involves human subjects goes through IRB review at every institute/university I have ever worked with.