Social Media Research

The Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing collaborated with their colleagues at Hopelab to pursue an exploratory qualitative research project to understand how experiences with social media interactions and content both positively and negatively impact the routine mental health and wellbeing of teens. By better understanding typical teen experiences online, this project aimed to elevate what teens see as supportive in their online interactions and what they wish would change. The findings also raised many new questions and opportunities for further research.

Since 2016, the Digital Innovation Lab at the University of North Carolina has been collecting tweets using #silentsam. Beginning in 2019, a team of graduate and undergraduate students have started the process of cleaning and visualizing this data, with the hope of exploring a set of research questions specific to the controversy surrounding the confederate monument in addition to establishing best practices for dealing with social media data in digital humanities projects.

This case study introduces users to a few analyses that can be performed with Communalytic and a Python library called twarc. This example will also show users how to explore the potential relationship between the toxicity scores of individual tweets and the likelihood that a tweet will still be publicly available days after the original data collection. As this is a tutorial, please note that any findings and observations noted in this post are for illustrative purposes only.

Snapchat is used as a way to document ones life and the lives of those around them. It’s also a portal to observe the habits of friends and strangers. People have the propensity to share their daily activities for their digital tribe. Snapchat gives individuals the ability to be the narrator of their own life. In a two week study of the behaviors of Snapchatters, By using participant observation, this study aims to understand the motives behind why people snap what they snap.

This project discusses how social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, reddit, wikis, and others can be used by network actors in positive and negative ways for community building and knowledge production. These dark patterns–user experiences that can convince people to participate in ways they may not want, need, or intend–can create realities that become unstoppable if platform owners are unwilling to act. This higher level of abstraction makes this an important topic for researchers grappling with issues of methods, ethics, and scholarship in social media.