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NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics is an academic research institute dedicated to studying how social media impacts politics, policy, and democracy.

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FEATURED WORK

Warnings May Reduce Hate Speech on Twitter

Warning Twitter users about potential adverse consequences of their use of hate speech can temporarily reduce their hateful language, finds our new study, published in Perspectives on Politics.

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Upcoming Event: Reducing Harm on Social Media

Join us December 15, as we bring together researchers and practitioners from across the academic, policy, and tech communities to discuss various approaches and interventions to make social media a safer and more civil place.

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Can Ordinary Users Fact Check Fake News?

Social media companies have suggested using ordinary users to assess the veracity of news articles and combat misinformation. But ordinary users cannot effectively identify false and misleading news in real time, compared to professional fact checkers, our new study found.

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A COMMITMENT TO OPEN SCIENCE

As part of our project to construct comprehensive data sets and to empirically test hypotheses related to social media and politics, we have developed a suite of open-source tools and modeling processes.

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Downloads of our open source software

You can explore and download our data collection and analysis tools here.

OPEN SOURCE TOOLS

smappdragon

smappdragon is a low level data parser designed for parsing twitter data.

pysmap

pysmapp is a high-level JSON-parser that extends smapdragon for non-coders

urlExpander

urlExpander is a Python module to quickly and thoroughly expand shortened urls

youtube-data-api

youtube-data-api is a Python client to download public YouTube data about channels, videos, and searches

streamR package

streamR is a package written by Pablo Barbera and published on CRAN that provides access to Twitter’s Streaming API via the R language. The package allows for easy creation of filter, sample and user streams: this involves tooling for creation of an OAuth token, opening a filter connection with twitter that returns real time public statuses based on given terms or parameters, for a given user or users, or a random sample of these statuses (up to 1% of all tweets at any given time, which is the Twitter limit) and functions for reading and parsing the results into a data frame.

Rfacebook package

The Rfacebook package was written by Pablo Barbera, Michael Piccirilli, Andrew Geisler, and Wouter van Attendeldt and published on CRAN. It allows for easy interaction with the Facebook via R and provides many different functions for interacting with the API to obtain information about users, posts and to collect public status updates the mention specific keywords. Some examples of the tooling provided include: functions to create an OAuth token, get posts, likes, reactions, shares, users, getting page insights for a specific time period, getting an adjacency matrix representing a users mutual friend network, general facebook search, facebook group search. The package is built out and includes unit testing.

instaR

instaR package provides a series of functions that allow R users to access Instagram’s API to search for media that mention specific hashtags or were sent from a certain location, to download recent pictures from a given users, and to capture lists of followers.

Local News Dataset

A directory of local news outlets by state and medium. Includes social media accounts for local news outlets.

mediascores

R-package to estimate media scores from url sharing data

WHO WE ARE

Drawing from politics, data science, biology, and psychology, CSMaP is a diverse community of scholars studying the intersection of social media and politics.

Meet our full team

RICHARD BONNEAU

Faculty Director

ZHANNA TERECHSHENKO

Postdoctoral Fellow

JENNIFER LARSON

Research Associate

EDWIN KAMAU

Research/Data Engineer

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