An Overview of the Work of the Social Media Observatory

The final session of this very enjoyable Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg begins with our gracious host, Felix Victor Münch, introducing the Social Media Observatory (SMO) project at the Hans-Bredow-Institut and Research Institute Social Cohesion. Felix introduces this as a kind of DIY research infrastructure building effort.

People using social media data come from a very wide range of disciplines and bring diverse perspectives to the research; in addition to creating quite a bit of confusion, this can also support the creation of new approaches and epistemologies, and will benefit from a pragmatic and even pragmaticist approach to the research. Pragmatic questions for the research then address ethical, legal, capability and infrastructure, reproducibility, and validity questions.

Solutions to those questions in the present case are to develop an ethics guide for social media research (called Socrates, the Social Media Research Assessment Template for Ethical Scholarship); to develop the frameworks for knowledge creation and curation (through an SMO wiki platform); to provide research training in data collection, processing, and analysis; to provide infrastructure in the form of tools for social media data gathering (so far, across Twitter, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram, and news sites), of comprehensive baseline datasets, and of data collection and processing architecture (either directly, or as advice on how to set up such architecture locally).

Next steps for the SMO are to develop a Digital Media Ecosystem Index (DIMEX), providing information on content trends across platforms; a data dashboard on deleted tweets by German MPs; a tracker showing sentiment and toxicity trends in German MPs’ tweets; and a Ukraine Twitter conversation dashboard. There is also an effort to collaborate with data journalists at German media organisations to transfer such insights to the broader public.