Data Reports

Issue Discussion in the Georgia Senate Elections

2020:04

The Center for Social Media and Politics analyzed what issues matter to voters in Georgia by analyzing their tweets. We were interested in a set of research questions. First, what issues were Georgians talking about when they talked about each candidate? Second, were Georgians discussing the elections in nationalized or strategic terms: mentioning national Republican or Democratic figures? Third, were Georgians mentioning topics that were brought up in attack ads? Fourth, was there variation across ideological, ethnic, and gender lines in these behaviors?

Influential Users in the Common Core and Black Lives Matter Social Media Conversation

2020:03

The Center for Social Media and Politics analyzed discussion on Twitter about two issues as they evolved over time: Black Lives Matter and Common Core State Standards. We found that politically motivated popular users are the most influential users in both CCSS and BLM online conversations.

How the Common Core and Black Lives Matter Discussions Evolved on Social Media

2020:02

The Center for Social Media and Politics analyzed discussion on Twitter about two issues as they evolved over time: Black Lives Matter and Common Core State Standards. We show that politicization of the issues did not follow the same path, and different types of messages and senders were influential in expanding and shaping the discussions.

Debate Twitter: Mapping User Reactions to the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary Debates

2020:01

The Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University collected and analyzed Twitter data to explore and understand user reactions to the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary debates.

The Internet Research Agency’s Use of Local and Fake News in the 2016 US Presidential Campaign

2018:01

The NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab analyzed data shared publicly by Twitter on the activity of the Kremlin-linked “Internet Research Agency” (IRA) to examine whether IRA-operated Twitter accounts spread polarizing or misleading content on social media platforms in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Syrian Refugee Crisis Data Report

2016:02

Five years after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the daily death toll continues to climb, and the massive displacement of civilians has become one of the greatest humanitarian crises in modern history. Social media data provide new insight into how the world watches a humanitarian disaster unfold in real time. In particular, the temporal granularity and networked structure of Twitter data provide key insights into what events grab global attention, how perceptions of refugees shift over time, and whose narratives about refugees gain traction.

Brexit Data Report

2016:01

Analysis of over 29 million tweets collected at NYU’s Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab provides the following insights into the success of the “leave” campaign, the surprising dominance of economic issues in the online debate, and the referendum’s increasingly global audience.

The Fourth GOP Debate: Going Beyond Mentions

2015:03

We analyzed 426,717 tweets from the fourth GOP debate, hosted by Fox Business Network and The Wall Street Journal Tuesday night (specifically, those with the hashtags “#gopdebate”, “#fbngopdebate”, or “#RepublicanDebate”). What we found highlights the importance of looking beyond mere “mentions” of names and keywords when studying political discussions on Twitter.

The Third Republican Debate: During and After

2015:02

When combined with contextual information that we can infer about the people posting the tweets, we can investigate how different groups (Republicans vs. Democrats, for example) respond to events and whether they are doing so in a supportive or critical way. For the analyses here, we start with a collection of every tweet posted during the third GOP debate that contained one of the associated hashtags – giving us a set of of 404,750 tweets. We then combined the tweets with unique measures of the ideology of the sender of each tweet, derived from the follower networks of each sender.

The Islamic State’s Battle for the Global Twittersphere

2015:01

SMaPP has collected tweets containing ISIS-related keywords that provide new perspective on the impact of ISIS in the global Twittersphere. The collection includes 28,758,083 tweets, or all tweets containing Arabic, transliterated Arabic, or English keywords that reference ISIS positively, negatively, or neutrally between February 3 and July 21, 2015. By observing fluctuations in positive, negative, and neutral ISIS-related tweet volume, language, location, and content over time we can gain a more systematic understanding of the online impact of ISIS’ actions and its social media strategy.

Tweeting the Revolution: Social Media Use and the #Euromaidan protests

2014:01

Starting on November 25th, we began collecting Twitter data of the Euromaidan protests. Almost three months later, our dataset contains more than 3.6 million tweets. What can we learn from the Ukrainian case about the use of social media in protest and the dynamics of previous protests that utilized social media? We find that online information distribution, specifically on Facebook, serves a dual purpose of providing information and helping to coordinate efforts on the ground. The protests show that social media users strategically adapt the tools available to them to the situation on the ground as well as to the local social media context. In a country where Twitter is less used than Facebook, organizers employed Facebook as a tool for informational exchange and strategic planning, as well as to mobilize needed resources and to fill gaps or supplement on the ground strategies

A Breakout Role for Twitter? The Role of Social Media in the Turkish Protests

2013:02

SMaPP’s dataset of Tweets related to the Turkish protests now comprises more than 22 million tweets. The study of social media can shed interesting light into the dynamics of information diffusion in the organization of collective action. This is particularly the case when social media, as in the Turkish protests, supplies information that is suppressed by traditional media. Evidence suggests that 15K users sent at least one tweet from Gezi Park, which points at the spillover effects of online activity into offline action.

Twitter and 2013 Italian Parliamentary Elections: Preliminary Report

2013:01

During the 2013 Italian Parliamentary Elections, a total of 1.1 million tweets in Italian mentioning a set of relevant keywords have been captured since January 18. 182,000 different users have sent at least one tweet (in Italian) about the election. In this report, we present our a summary of our preliminary findings.