Academic Research

Online data is key to understanding the leadup to the January 6 insurrection, including how and why election fraud conspiracies spread online, how conspiracy groups organized online to participate in the insurrection, and other factors of online life that led to the insurrection. However, there are significant challenges in accessing data for this research. First, platforms restrict which researchers get access to data, as well as what researchers can do with the data they access. Second, this data is ephemeral; that is, once users or the platform remove the data, researchers can no longer access it. These factors affect what research questions can ever be asked and answered.

The intersection of social media and politics is yet another realm in which Computational Social Science has a paramount role to play. In this review, I examine the questions that computational social scientists are attempting to answer – as well as the tools and methods they are developing to do so – in three areas where the rise of social media has led to concerns about the quality of democracy in the digital information era: online hate; misinformation; and foreign influence campaigns. I begin, however, by considering a precursor of these topics – and also a potential hope for social media to be able to positively impact the quality of democracy – by exploring attempts to measure public opinion online using Computational Social Science methods. In all four areas, computational social scientists have made great strides in providing information to policy makers and the public regarding the evolution of these very complex phenomena but in all cases could do more to inform public policy with better access to the necessary data; this point is discussed in more detail in the conclusion of the review.

This chapter examines the use of social networking sites such as Twitter in measuring public opinion. It first considers the opportunities and challenges that are involved in conducting public opinion surveys using social media data. Three challenges are discussed: identifying political opinion, representativeness of social media users, and aggregating from individual responses to public opinion. The chapter outlines some of the strategies for overcoming these challenges and proceeds by highlighting some of the novel uses for social media that have fewer direct analogs in traditional survey work. Finally, it suggests new directions for a research agenda in using social media for public opinion work.