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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. Facilitating a Scientific Approach to the Datafication of Society on Twitter, or: How to Catch a Tweeting Bird

Authors : Samuel Breidenbach, Peter Klimczak

Published in: Soziale Medien

Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

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Abstract

In times of increasing societal significance of public discourse on social media, questions surrounding the possibilities of access to the data generated are becoming ever more pressing. Using the example of the short message service Twitter, the article describes not only how everyday individual observations can be recorded on social media, but also the changes to which the availability of socially relevant information is subject, if society has only selective access to it and modes of access are being transformed generally: digital data requires for its generation, storage and analysis – especially that of large amounts of data – the technical system of the computer, which selects data according to particular observational interests and allows it to appear in a new context.

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However, even this practice comes in for criticism, since screenshots, as image files, are always manipulable with minimal technical effort. A further possibility for documenting tweets, which comes closer to fulfilling the requirement of authentic reproduction, are archiving services, by means of which it is possible to archive entire websites (e.g. https://archive.org/).

https://twitter.com/ArchivFD/ [Accessed: 24 June 2019]. Unfortunately, the account profile of the bot @ArchivFD does not provide information on the technology it uses. It is possible that the bot creates a screenshot of every post published by selected AfD accounts, then shares this in case the tweet is later deleted.

How controversial Tauber’s statement on Twitter was can be gauged from the unusually high number of replies to the tweet (over 1600).

This especially applies to interaction or communication between public figures and private individuals, e.g. between politicians and (critical) citizens, stars and their fans (or haters), but also between people whose social standing, political views or, simply, whose living environments are too disparate to allow opportunities for communication to arise under normal circumstances.

It should be noted that binarity is not negatively connoted here. In system theory, binary coding of information is a necessary condition for communication in general (see Luhmann 2012, p. 212).

In response to Lazer’s point of view, Paßmann (2014) states that such data is never generated independently of any observational perspective, but only independently of the perspective of the scientific observer. Posts on social media and related data such as the likes or retweet count can also be determined by the anticipated expectations of the recipients of one’s own post – as an observation of their observation of one’s own observation – if, for example, a tweet is only published in the expectation that the topic discussed can be used to generate a high number of retweets and likes on Twitter and among one’s own followers.

Public user information includes all data that is also displayed to all users by Twitter’s interfaces, such as the text, likes and retweets of a post or profile information, as well as the followings of an account. Non-public information, on the other hand, is the data of protected accounts (for which followers need to be confirmed by the account in question), individuals’ duration of use of the service, and information about the reach of one’s own tweets (the number of accounts to which the tweet appears in their feed, i.e. the sum of one’s own followers and the number of followers of those accounts that retweeted the tweet), which are only displayed to the tweet’s originator. Beyond this, it is very likely that the company collects further data from Twitter that is completely inaccessible to the public.

It may also occur that not all tweets of a user are displayed in his or her timeline, because Twitter limits the ability to scroll on its webpages. If the number of Tweets in an account exceeds the amount of Tweets that can be displayed, only tweets up to a certain point in time are displayed. However, all historical tweets can be found using the service’s search function.

https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

www.twitonomy.com

The Python module Tweepy served as wrapper for the Twitter API. Using the search function to determine all tweets for a hashtag or keyword, an analysis was conducted of all accounts that at the time of the investigation were tweeting about the hashtags #exploreMW or #Kopftuchverbot or the search terms ‘Wiglaf Droste’ or ‘Vizepräsident’, but whose status count was a maximum of 500 each (a total of 519 accounts). These hashtags and keywords were trending on Twitter in Germany at the time of the investigation but had a current tweet volume of less than 5000. Using the get_user_timeline function, the number of tweets released (total 104,569) was compared with the respective user’s status count, which shows the number of tweets available.

Bruns and Burgess (2016, p. 26) state that the cost of larger and long-term studies can easily be several tens of thousands of dollars, which stands in contrast to the funding available for public research.

Irrespective of the completeness of access to these databases and the desire of the market and research to be able to access them, it should be pointed out that data protection and ethical issues naturally also become acute when the personal data of users is queried and stored on a large scale.

However, in their paper Bruns and Weller (2016) also raise the question of how individual tweets or the surface design of the application at a certain point in time as well as views of profile homepages can be preserved at all.

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Title: Facilitating a Scientific Approach to the Datafication of Society on Twitter, or: How to Catch a Tweeting Bird
Authors: Samuel Breidenbach
Peter Klimczak
Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden
Book: Soziale Medien
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-30701-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-658-30702-8

Copyright Year: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30702-8_4

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