In order to research social media platforms, digital data must be collected and evaluated in a platform-specific manner. However, platforms are interwoven with each other through their users and on the content and technical level. Philipp Kessling, Mattes Ruckdeschel, Dr. Felix Victor Münch and Dr. Gregor Wiedemann have developed methods and strategies for analyzing cross-platform social media data as part of the collaborative project NOTORIOUS – The Role of Celebrities in Disinformation Campaigns.
How Do You Research Content across Platforms?
As the infrastructure of the (proprietary) digital public sphere, social media platforms are generally not isolated, but are interwoven with each other through their user base and at the content and technical level. Among other things, the different orientations of the platforms contribute to these interrelations. X.com is less suitable as a photo gallery, Instagram is only suitable for text via detours, and videos are usually not hosted on LinkedIn, but rather on YouTube. This creates a cross-platform digital space in which public discourse takes place on several levels.
For the content analysis of (political) discourses, this results in technical challenges, since the collection and processing of digital data must be realized in a platform-specific way. For the cross-platform analysis, this data must then be made comparable, which can lead to interventions in the content due to the different affordances of the platforms. This in turn can be disadvantageous for an analysis. Accordingly, decisions to standardize content must be well considered.
The goal of the project “NOTORIOUS – The Role of Celebrities in Disinformation Campaigns” has been to make these distribution traces for specific content – especially disinformation – comprehensible in cross-platform discourse spaces. To this end, a new analysis method was developed that addresses the above challenges in relation to the selection, collection, alignment, processing and analysis of data from multiple social media platforms.
In a report, Philipp Kessling, Mattes Ruckdeschel, Felix Victor Münch and Gregor Wiedemann present the strategies and approaches used to select actors, content and platforms and shed light on the approach they are pursuing. A case study is used to illustrate this, which served as a pilot study to test methods at the beginning of the project and has been continuously developed since then.
You can download the report on “Cross-Plattform-Social-Media-Forschung: Methoden der Datengewinnung und Analyse” [Cross-Platform Social Media Research: Methods of Data Collection and Analysis].
The report is also available on the website of our project partner, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) Germany.