Social media monitoring of the campaigns for the 2013 German Bundestag elections on Facebook and Twitter

vi, 32 S.
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Köln
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GESIS-Leibniz Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
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2014,

Kaczmirek, Lars, Philipp Mayr, Ravi Vatrapu, Arnim Bleier, Manuela Blumenberg, Tobias Gummer, Abid Hussain, Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda, Kaveh Manshaei, Mark Thamm, Katrin Weller, Alexander Wenz, Christof Wolf
ISSN: 1869-0491 (online)
Abstract

As more and more people use social media to communicate their view and perception of elec- tions, researchers have increasingly been collecting and analyzing data from social media plat- forms. Our research focuses on social media communication related to the 2013 election of the German parliament [translation: Bundestagswahl 2013] . We constructed several social media datasets using data from Facebook and Twitter. First, we identified the most relevant candidates (n=2,346) and checked whether they maintained social media accounts. The Facebook data was collected in November 2013 for the period of January 2009 to October 2013. On Facebook we identified 1,408 Facebook walls containing approximately 469,000 posts. Twitter data was col- lected between June and December 2013 finishing with the constitution of the government. On Twitter we identified 1,009 candidates and 76 other agents, for example, journalists. We estimat- ed the number of relevant tweets to exceed eight million for the period from July 27 to Septem- ber 27 alone. In this document we summarize past research in the literature, discuss possibilities for research with our data set, explain the data collection procedures, and provide a description of the data and a discussion of issues for archiving and dissemination of social media data.