How can we analyze social media discourse and dispute on collective or social memory?
Memory never sleeps. In times of worldwide crisis like the Corona pandemic and climate change, intellectuals debate (again) about the singularity of the Holocaust. Postcolonial historian A. Dirk Moses called the German memory of the Shoah the “Catechism of the Germans” (Moses 2021). Without engaging…
Challenges and potentials of visual computational analysis Insights from a study on politicians’ self-depiction and their news portrayal
Visuals are omnipresent in contemporary online political communication. This can be considered a consequence of the development of new and more visual social media platforms such as Instagram, and has been fueled by the increasing mediatization and personalization of political processes. Research from psychology indicates…
A moving target. The methodological challenges of studying political actors on Instagram
Visuals have been part of political communication for a long time. Political TV-advertising, campaign posters, cartoons and even hand gestures have been studied. Over the past five years there has been a substantial increase of studies on visual political communication. Social media in particular seem…
Can we observe public opinion on Twitter?
Twitter data can provide a glimpse into public opinion, but a distorted one. This is the main finding of a recent study we conducted that compares Twitter data with polling data and election results. In times when response rates in survey research decline, and those…
Twitter naming and shaming, Facebook anger activation and… data access.
Even though Obama had already been labeled ‘the social media president’, ever since the Trump election and Brexit referendum researchers, campaigners and pundits alike have been wondering to what extent social media help win elections. Most of the pundits at least seem to buy the…
Why Data Tracking Provides a Much Less Accurate Picture of Media Exposure than Often Assumed
Most of what we know about politics, we know from the media. We get most of our information about political issues, actors, and opinions there, which makes the media an important influencing factor on public opinion. Nowadays, this applies also to social media to an…
Automated measurement of populist communication across cultures: (how) can it be done? Experience from a Twitter study on high-ranking politicians.
The latest French and American presidential election campaigns provided a splendid opportunity to determine the intercultural relevance of populist discourses. In France, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a right-wing and a left-wing outsider, competed with Emmanuel Macron, a relative newcomer with strong ties to…
A case of throwing the baby with the bathwater: Facebook API restrictions
Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there has been an ongoing debate about the privacy of social media data and ethical use of them. The role of Cambridge Analytica in the outcome of Brexit Referendum and the US presidential election is not crystal clear but…
Why Social Media Data Don’t Tell Us Very Much About Public Opinion
When social scientists want to learn something about public opinion, they traditionally conduct surveys, using representative samples. Representativity means that even with relatively small numbers of participants, if selected at random, the opinions expressed by the sample can be generalized to the population as a…