Social Media Data—A Glorious Mess

Social media became a mass media that is used by organizations, private persons, journalists, and US presidents. This opens up great potentials to share and disseminate information on different platforms and in various formats. At the beginning of this development some researchers expressed hope (and still do) that this could be a chance for useful public multi-directional communication between citizens and politicians as well as between consumers and companies. Higher transparency, consensus building, sharing of personal experiences are examples for positive expectations towards social media. At the same time, it is becoming obvious that negative effects such as the spreading of fake news and rumours or manipulation of people by social bots and echo chambers are serious challenges for organizations, people, and society. What can researchers do to contribute to this problem? We need to be able to collect and analyse communication in order to understand the underlying principles and to derive solutions that lower the dark sides of social media. Structuring social media data is one of the most important steps in this context in order to increase transparency and prevent misuse. This article explains what it actually is what we need to structure, why it is relevant to structure and how we can do it.