Opening Doors to Sharing Social Media Data

Research data sharing becomes increasingly difficult in the context of social media. Increasing restrictions from social media sites are creating an environment where data cannot be freely shared and as a result scientific claims cannot be verified. In this work, we present a novel approach to data sharing that does not require explicitly publishing a dataset. We create a framework where researchers systematically share the parameters they used to crawl the dataset along with the code used to collect the data, allowing the reader to re-assemble the dataset at a later time. While this approach is by no means a silver bullet, we seek to start a conversation for researchers to implement approaches to data sharing that can be embraced by the research community.