Systematically Monitoring Social Media: The case of the German federal election 2017

TL;DR

This paper discusses a systematic approach to monitoring social media during the 2017 German federal election, addressing challenges in data collection, validity, reliability, and data sharing for political communication research.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive methodology for large-scale social media data collection that adheres to academic standards, focusing on Facebook and Twitter during a major election.

Findings

Developed a protocol for selecting relevant social media accounts and posts.

Ensured high reliability and validity in data collection process.

Facilitated data sharing for future research and replication.

Abstract

It is a considerable task to collect digital trace data at a large scale and at the same time adhere to established academic standards. In the context of political communication, important challenges are (1) defining the social media accounts and posts relevant to the campaign (content validity), (2) operationalizing the venues where relevant social media activity takes place (construct validity), (3) capturing all of the relevant social media activity (reliability), and (4) sharing as much data as possible for reuse and replication (objectivity). This project by GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the E-Democracy Program of the University of Koblenz-Landau conducted such an effort. We concentrated on the two social media networks of most political relevance, Facebook and Twitter.