Devoted users: EU elections and gamification on Twitter
Our study, whose preliminary results we recently presented at the 2019 SISP (Italian Political Science Association) Conference, examines the visibility of the tweets posted by Italian political leaders during the last EU Elections campaign. We show how crowd-sourced and spontaneous political action, triggered by a social media game, can take an almost social bot-like nature and significantly boost the visibility of tweets by political leaders during a major political event.
Social media data in research: a review of the current landscape
Social media has brought about rapid change in society, from our social interactions and complaint systems to our elections and media outlets. It is increasingly used by individuals and organizations in both the public and private sectors. Over 30% of the world’s population is on social media. We spend most of our waking hours attached to our devices, with every minute in the US, 2.1M snaps are created and 1M people are logging in to Facebook. With all this use, comes a great amount of data.
Collecting social media data for research
Human social behavior has rapidly shifted to digital media services, whether Gmail for email, Skype for phone calls, Twitter and Facebook for micro-blogging, or WhatsApp and SMS for private messaging. This digitalization of social life offers researchers an unprecedented world of data with which to study human life and social systems. However, accessing this data has become increasingly difficult.
Fake news sharing is rare but older people over 65 are more likely to share these articles, study finds
These two studies examined fake news on separate social media platforms; Facebook and Twitter, with both concluding that sharing this content was a rare occurrence but when users did share fake news articles they tended to be older Americans over 65.
Watch the SAGE Ocean Speaker Series #5 with Pablo Barberá
Last month we were lucky enough to have Pablo Barberá, Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the London School of Economics deliver the 5th SAGE Ocean Speaker Series.
The Best Tools for Using Twitter as a Data Source
Although platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp have more active users, Twitter’s unique infrastructure and the near-total availability of its data have ensured its popularity among researchers remains high. In this post from the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog, Wasim Ahmed offers his rundown of the tools available to social scientists looking to analyse social media data.
Methods in Action: Tackling the Tweet
MethodSpace’s inaugural webinar ‘Methods in Action: Tackling the Tweet’ took place on April 13th with researchers Luke Sloan and Joshua Tucker. They explained how to conduct Twitter-based research projects while detailing some of the fascinating findings from their labs' social media research. The archived webinar and answers to some of the questions that couldn't be answered in the hour appear here.
Methods in Action: Social Media Surveys
Social media opens new doors in social and behavioral science research methods, but like all research, nothing is a given, In this interview, Torgeir Aleti explains his group's efforts to use Twitter to learn more about young Australians’ drinking habits, and the hard lessons they drew from the experience while trying to preserve the integrity, both design and ethical, of their research.