5  Week 5: Linked surveys and social media data

This week we’re going to be looking at two techniques for analyzing the digital world using computational techniques. And we’re going to be thinking about how we use these techniques to answer questions specific to the field of misinformation research.

The first are linked surveys. These are a type of survey that combine traditional survey analysis, often deployed through online means, with linked social media or other digital trace data. We’re going to be talking about challenges of probability and non-probability sampling online as well as questions of response and recall.

The second is a standalone example social media analysis. The analysis of social media data often combines multiple different tools in the computational researcher’s toolkit. In the worksheet for this week, we will have a chance to collect some of our social media data and analyze it.

5.1 Essential reading:

Guess, Nagler, and Tucker (2019)

González-Bailón and De Domenico (2021)

5.2 Additional reading:

Barrie and Frey (2021)

5.3 Slides

Slides for this week are available here

Barrie, Christopher, and Arun Frey. 2021. “Faces in the Crowd: Twitter as Alternative to Protest Surveys.” Edited by Barbara Guidi. PLOS ONE 16 (11): e0259972. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259972.

González-Bailón, Sandra, and Manlio De Domenico. 2021. “Bots Are Less Central Than Verified Accounts During Contentious Political Events.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (11). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2013443118.

Guess, Andrew, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker. 2019. “Less Than You Think: Prevalence and Predictors of Fake News Dissemination on Facebook.” Science Advances 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586.