Social Media

The final speaker in this session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Susmita Gangopadhyay, presenting a project that has engaged in a continuous crawl of Telegram’s public channels. Telegram is a platform that has grown substantially in recent years, with some 950 million users.

The platform has an API which can be used to gather data from the platform, and this tends to focus on groups (which are many-to-many, may be public or private, and have distinct administrators) and channels (which are one-to-many only, with named administrators). Otherwise there are some functional similarities between …

Up next at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Ramin Soleymani, whose focus is on the analysis of social media content from a social ecological perspective. The use of social media has enabled digital nature experiences, somewhat making up for an overall decline in the direct nature experiences of an increasingly urban population; this might lead to the emergence of digital relational values including seeding, spreading, and grounding.

Relational values are a relatively new concept in the science policy arena; they complement nature’s instrumental (extractive) and intrinsic (inherent) values. Relational values refer to the relationships …

The third and final day at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library starts with a paper by Alexander König, whose focus is on metadata for social media data. Creating quality metadata is critical for the appropriate storage and reuse of datasets, and especially so for social media dataset as the conditions of the data gathering and the state of the platform at the time of gathering also need to be captured in the metadata.

The CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Computer-Mediated Communication and Social Media Corporate (CKCMC) is currently developing a metadata standard for such data, incorporating …

The final speakers at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library for today are Oliver Watteler and Jan Schwalbach, whose interest is in the legal conditions for sharing platform data; platforms’ developer policies and Terms of Service are in constant flux, so it is important to keep track of how they evolve over time.

Researchers often have a strong interest in sharing the datasets they have collected with others; data sharing aids replicability, speeds up the research process, and enables new work. But researchers are rarely aware of the frameworks the platforms have imposed on such sharing …

And the next speaker at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Beatrice Cannelli, whose interest is in how national memory institutions’ social media archiving initiatives have been affected by changing data access regimes. Such activities are affected by national legal frameworks, available resources, collection policies and scope, technical limitations, and the Terms of Service of the various platforms.

The latter are justified by user privacy concerns and the protection of sensitive information, but in practice mostly protect the platforms’ own business interests. How these are formulated influences the extent to which content from such platforms …

The post-lunch session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library starts with LK Seiling and Sophia Graf, who discuss the Weizenbaum-Institut’s DSA40 Collaboratory project. The EU’s Digital Services Act provides for research access to public and non-public data via its articles 40(12) and 40(4), and in both cases this is limited to research that investigates what is called ‘systemic risks’, and to Very Large Online Platforms which serve at least 10% of the EU population, which translates to 45 million users.

If platforms are found to have failed to provide such access, the EU can (and …

The next speaker at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Robert Jäschke. He begins by noting the legal constraints on social media data sharing, including Terms of Service, copyright, and other restrictions. One approach to managing this is the way Twitter approached this: sharing datasets with lists of tweet IDs without any further content was allowed, and researchers then needed to ‘rehydrate’ them by regathering the tweet data. Another approach is to share only aggregate metrics rather than the source data themselves; or to share derived datasets (like term matrices, n-gram datasets, or word embeddings) …

And the next session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library starts with Ofra Klein, who will outline the challenges of studying far-right mobilisation in spite of the constraints of social media data access regimes. The far right use social media very extensively to promote their propaganda, and this can lead to physical demonstrations, riots, and violence; as and when this happens, social media posts and accounts are then often removed by the perpetrators of the platforms, complicating any meaningful research.

In addition, the number of platforms used for far-right agitation have diversified substantially; in addition …

Day Two at the Social Media Access Days in Frankfurt starts with my keynote, taking stock of how we access and engage with social media data nearly ten years after the drastic changes to many platforms' data access regimes following the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. Back then, I wrote an article for Information, Communication & Society about the APIcalypse; how have things developed since then?

Here are my slides from the talk: