A Multi-Platform Collection of Social Media Posts about the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive multi-platform social media dataset related to the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections, enabling cross-platform political discourse analysis and providing tools for future research.

Contribution

It provides a large, multi-platform dataset of social media posts about the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections and shares the source code for data collection pipeline.

Findings

Links posts across five social media platforms.

Tracks 1,011 candidates' social media accounts.

Covers posts from October 1 to December 25, 2022.

Abstract

Social media are utilized by millions of citizens to discuss important political issues. Politicians use these platforms to connect with the public and broadcast policy positions. Therefore, data from social media has enabled many studies of political discussion. While most analyses are limited to data from individual platforms, people are embedded in a larger information ecosystem spanning multiple social networks. Here we describe and provide access to the Indiana University 2022 U.S. Midterms Multi-Platform Social Media Dataset (MEIU22), a collection of social media posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and 4chan. MEIU22 links to posts about the midterm elections based on a comprehensive list of keywords and tracks the social media accounts of 1,011 candidates from October 1 to December 25, 2022. We also publish the source code of our pipeline to enable similar multi-platform research projects.