We’re now in the high season for scientific conferences, and for those who have been attending conferences for a number of years, you’ll have noticed more and more people typing away on social media during the presentations. Live tweeting conferences—that is, posting on Twitter about conference talks in real-time—has been picking up steam for years now.
Though it’s a pretty common and largely unremarked-upon activity mostly done by people with the best of intentions, there are both positive and negative ramifications to live tweeting that deserve to be considered. Here, I’ll discuss aspects of both sides of this issue without advocating for a particular side and also lay out best practices for those who decide to live tweet.
The Good
Why take the time and effort to live tweet? The biggest positive of this practice is that it increases the number of people who can participate in the information exchange of a conference. Those who can’t be there because of either physical or financial barriers get a chance to follow along with the talks, see some of the slides, and even ask questions if live tweeters are willing to pass them along to the speaker. It broadens the talk’s audience and can help reduce barriers for marginalized scientists.
Even those who do attend the conference but can’t make it to certain talks because of concurrent sessions can benefit from live tweeting. Making the substance of a talk available for anyone who cares to go find it online increases the dissemination of (often publicly funded) research and has the potential to bring public and media attention to work that might otherwise have been overlooked. Tweets may also benefit the speaker in the form of online discussion that generates further ideas or previous research the researcher may not have been aware of.
In addition to being a sort of public service, live tweeting can reward the tweeter with increased social media reach and networking, serve as a form of note-taking for the conference, and can be good practice for boiling complex ideas down to their essential points.
The Bad & The Ugly
So what could go wrong? Conferences are all about the open exchange of ideas, right? But it’s not always quite that simple. A number of problems can arise if research gets out to the public too early on in the process.
First, findings discussed at conferences are often not yet peer reviewed and should therefore be taken as provisional, a fact many non-scientists aren’t aware of. Very early findings may open the researchers to getting “scooped”—that is, having another lab complete and publish their ideas or experiments before they can.
For researchers working with marginalized communities, having findings released to the public before they have been brought back to that community can severely undermine the trust the research is built on.
Finally, for those researchers whose work has commercial or industrial applications, public exposure of their work could open them up to having their ideas stolen by competitors or affect later patent applications.
The short, distilled nature of tweets also means that complex concepts and conclusions can sometimes be taken out of context, causing readers to misunderstand the presenter’s work in a way that a live audience wouldn’t. Less innocently, findings can be intentionally taken out of context by those wishing to use them to advance political or otherwise partisan agendas.
For conferences that deal with sensitive or controversial subject matter, live tweets may draw unwelcome attention to the conference as well as enable trolls to harass the tagged speaker via social media, a problem discussed more in-depth in this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Best Practices
While there are a number of important caveats about live tweeting and contexts in which it absolutely should not be done, the benefits are important enough that this practice is probably here to stay, at least until a better alternative comes along. So for those who plan to live tweet a conference this summer, here are some best practices to think about, to reap the benefits of this trend while minimizing potential problems.
First, and most obviously, try to find out whether or not the speaker wants their talk live tweeted. Note that sometimes, permission or lack thereof appears as a sign or symbol in the speaker’s slide presentation or on a nearby table. With panels, this can be complicated, since different panelists may have different feelings about being live tweeted, but do your best to ascertain whether it’s okay.
If the presenter is okay with tweeting, be sure to use their handle, if you know or can find it, or at the very least their name and use the official conference hashtag so your tweets are easy to find. Remember to use quotation marks if you’re quoting the speaker directly, and of course, if you get something wrong, issue a correction immediately, threaded to the original tweet so people are sure to see it. And as for tweeting out photos of slides or even posters, which contain much more information than a single slide, be sure you have the presenter’s permission to do this.
This article goes through how to best structure your tweets to present a clear and compelling message to those following them. One creative way of addressing live tweeting as a speaker is to live tweet your own talk. Set up a series of scheduled tweets timed to appear at intervals as you deliver your presentation. You may not be the only one tweeting about your talk, but at least you’ll know the correct information and context are out there for those who want to find them.
If you disagree with a speaker’s point of view or interpretation or find an error in their work, general wisdom is that it’s better to address it privately rather than in a public tweet, though here’s a critique of that idea, with reasons why posting concerns via Twitter may actually be better in certain cases.
Regardless, if you engage with or critique a speaker as part of your live tweeting, don’t be cruel or sarcastic. There’s no need to be hurtful, and it won’t reflect well on you as the tweeter if you’re unprofessional toward a fellow researcher.
Live tweeting at conferences, as is so often the case with social media, has both a light and a dark side. It has the potential to reduce barriers to the spread of knowledge in science and to bring much deserved attention to research that otherwise may have been overlooked. But it also has the potential to spread that information before it’s ready for public consumption and to draw negative social media attention to speakers conducting sensitive or controversial research.
Even today, many conferences still don’t have explicit social media policies, so unless and until the practice is outright banned, it will probably continue for the foreseeable future. If you choose to live tweet talks, be sure to do it in a way that’s both ethical and considerate, so everyone can reap the benefits rather than the consequences.
