Measuring Public Opinion with Social Media Data

Author(s):  
Marko Klašnja ◽  
Pablo Barberá ◽  
Nick Beauchamp ◽  
Jonathan Nagler ◽  
Joshua A. Tucker

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.

Author(s):  
Suman Silwal ◽  
Dale W Callahan

Social Media (SM) is becoming a normal part of everyday life. The information generated from Social Media (SM) data is becoming increasingly utilized as a communication channel for market trend, brand awareness, breaking news, and online social interaction between person to person. SM is also rapidly growing and maturing [1]. Further, SM is becoming a reliable tool for interdisciplinary industries like banks, travel, healthcare, biotech, software, sports etc.SM data can also be used as a research tool to apply in different areas of Humanities, Art, Science and Engineering. There are unlimited possibilities using Social Networking Site (SNS) to collect, process and evaluate data. This paper reviews the current state of Social Networking Sites and Text-based Language Processes, and how it can be used to generate valuable information.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Joseph ◽  
Sarah Shugars ◽  
Ryan Gallagher ◽  
Jon Green ◽  
Alexi Quintana Mathé ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Luqman Jamil ◽  
Sebastião Pais ◽  
João Cordeiro ◽  
Gaël Dias

Abstract Online social networking platforms allow people to freely express their ideas, opinions, and emotions negatively or positively. Previous studies have examined user’s sentiments on these platforms to study their behaviour in different contexts and purposes. The mechanism of collecting public opinion information has attracted researchers to automatically classify the polarity of public opinions based on the use of concise language in messages, such as tweets, by analyzing social media data. In this paper, we extend the preceding work [1], by proposing an unsupervised approach to automatically detect extreme opinions/posts in social networks. We have evaluated our performance on five different social network and media datasets. In this work, we use the semi-supervised approach BERT to check the accuracy of our classified dataset. The latter task shows that, in these datasets, posts that were previously classified as negative or positive are, in fact, extremely negative or positive in many cases.


Author(s):  
Philip Habel ◽  
Yannis Theocharis

In the last decade, big data, and social media in particular, have seen increased popularity among citizens, organizations, politicians, and other elites—which in turn has created new and promising avenues for scholars studying long-standing questions of communication flows and influence. Studies of social media play a prominent role in our evolving understanding of the supply and demand sides of the political process, including the novel strategies adopted by elites to persuade and mobilize publics, as well as the ways in which citizens react, interact with elites and others, and utilize platforms to persuade audiences. While recognizing some challenges, this chapter speaks to the myriad of opportunities that social media data afford for evaluating questions of mobilization and persuasion, ultimately bringing us closer to a more complete understanding Lasswell’s (1948) famous maxim: “who, says what, in which channel, to whom, [and] with what effect.”


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Small ◽  
Kristine Kasianovitz ◽  
Ronald Blanford ◽  
Ina Celaya

Social networking sites and other social media have enabled new forms of collaborative communication and participation for users, and created additional value as rich data sets for research. Research based on accessing, mining, and analyzing social media data has risen steadily over the last several years and is increasingly multidisciplinary; researchers from the social sciences, humanities, computer science and other domains have used social media data as the basis of their studies. The broad use of this form of data has implications for how curators address preservation, access and reuse for an audience with divergent disciplinary norms related to privacy, ownership, authenticity and reliability.In this paper, we explore how the characteristics of the Twitter platform, coupled with an ambiguous and evolving understanding of privacy in networked communication, and divergent disciplinary understandings of the resulting data, combine to create complex issues for curators trying to ensure broad-based and ethical reuse of Twitter data. We provide a case study of a specific data set to illustrate how data curators can engage with the topics and questions raised in the paper. While some initial suggestions are offered to librarians and other information professionals who are beginning to receive social media data from researchers, our larger goal is to stimulate discussion and prompt additional research on the curation and preservation of social media data.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dubois ◽  
Anatoliy Gruzd ◽  
Jenna Jacobson

Journalists increasingly use social media data to infer and report public opinion by quoting social media posts, identifying trending topics, and reporting general sentiment. In contrast to traditional approaches of inferring public opinion, citizens are often unaware of how their publicly available social media data is being used and how public opinion is constructed using social media analytics. In this exploratory study based on a census-weighted online survey of Canadian adults (N=1,500), we examine citizens’ perceptions of journalistic use of social media data. We demonstrate that: (1) people find it more appropriate for journalists to use aggregate social media data rather than personally identifiable data; (2) people who use more social media are more likely to positively perceive journalistic use of social media data to infer public opinion; and (3) the frequency of political posting is positively related to acceptance of this emerging journalistic practice, which suggests some citizens want to be heard publicly on social media while others do not. We provide recommendations for journalists on the ethical use of social media data and social media platforms on opt-in functionality.


AI Magazine ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 93-98
Author(s):  
Jisun An ◽  
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia ◽  
Nir Grinberg ◽  
Kenneth Joseph ◽  
Alexios Mantzarlis ◽  
...  

The Workshop Program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s International Conference on Web and Social Media (AAAI-17) was held in Montréal, Québec, Canada on Tuesday, May 15, 2017. There were eight workshops in the program: Digital Misinformation, Events Analytics Using Social Media Data, News and Public Opinion, Observational Studies through Social Media, Perceptual Biases and Social Media, Social Media and Demographic Research, Studying User Perceptions and Experiences with Algorithms, The ICWSM Science Slam. Workshops were held on the first day of the conference. Workshop participants met and discussed issues with a selected focus — providing an informal setting for active exchange among researchers, developers, and users on topics of current interest. Organizers from two of the workshop chose to include papers in the AAAI Technical Reports series (Observational Studies through Social Media and News and Public Opinion). Their papers were included as a nonarchival part of the ICWSM proceedings. Organizers from four of the workshops (Digital Misinformation, News and Public Opinion, Perceptual Biases and Social Media, and Studying User Perceptions and Experiences with Algorithms) submitted reports, which are reproduced in this report. Brief summaries of the other four workshops have been reproduced from their website descriptions.


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