EXECUTIVE SUMMARY • This submission addresses the representational and ethical limitations of using social media data to establish facts • Social media data is not directly representative of facts offline because it is subject to a variety of distortions, including those arising from: o The commercial nature of social media platforms o The fragmented nature of social media data and the difficulty in definitively establishing the source, place, and time of production as a result of the lack of cues and context for the reader o The emergence of social media platforms as important sites where social and political conflicts play out • In order to use social media data to establish a fact, it must undergo a verification process o This verification process requires time, triangulation (crossreferencing using a variety of sources and methods) and human expertise o Verification is thus incompatible with real-time analytics of social media data • Furthermore, because verifying social media data may involve identifying its source, this approach raises ethical concerns related to accessing data, informed consent, and anonymization • Social media may be used to create an ‘awareness system’ (Hermida, 2009), which could indicate areas of interest for directing further research and investigations. However, such an approach must, we believe, minimize the collection of personal data and requires the triangulation of research methods and sources before any actionable claims are made as to the representativeness of social media data • We arrive at these recommendations based on our experience conducting research on social media use in times of conflict