Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media

Computational social science has expanded the capacity of scientists to study connected human behavior at previously unprecedented scales. Yet from its beginning, scientists expressed concern that its reliance on private companies might produce a body of work that cannot be critiqued or replicated. Such commercial determinants of science have been observed in other fields including public health …

The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar was as much a political event as a sporting one, marked by controversies over the death of construction workers, concerns over LGBTQ+ rights, and allegations of corruption. Drawing on 573,927 tweets from UK-based accounts and 15,812 excerpts from 66 UK newspapers, we examine how political and apolitical attention to the competition was distributed across mainstrea…

In a rapidly evolving digital media landscape, understanding how exposure to untrustworthy news changes over time is essential for evaluating its potential effects on public attitudes and behavior. However, there is limited evidence on how demand for untrustworthy news develops across longer time frames. Linking web data with surveys, we compare exposure to untrustworthy news sources across demog…

Conspiracy theories have long drawn public attention, but their explosive growth on platforms like Telegram during the COVID-19 pandemic raises pressing questions about their impact on societal trust, democracy, and public health. We provide a temporal and network analysis of the structure of conspiracy-related German-language Telegram chats in a novel large-scale dataset, which captures a signif…

A key focus in the study of digital and social media in politics has been to investigate the homophily of online interactions and content exposure, often framed as the extent to which these platforms operate as echo chambers. However, research in this area has yielded mixed findings. One possible explanation is that the degree of homophily in online behavior varies depending on the specific type …

LGBTQ visibility is an often discussed but rarely quantified concept. Here we operationalize visibility as the prevalence of active social media accounts with an LGBTQ signifier in the profile bio and measure the prevalence of such accounts consistently and persistently at daily resolution over twelve years in the United States. We found that prevalence for the signifiers lesbian, gay, bisexual, …

Social media companies continuously experiment with various platform governance models to tackle content moderation challenges, which calls for a comprehensive and empirical understanding of how a content moderation system evolves over the long term. Our study aims to fill this gap through a quantitative and qualitative study of Weibo’s community-driven content moderation system, leveraging eleve…

How do corporations engage in political speech in the age of social media? Evidence suggests that online corporate brands employ a variety of partisan signals which include not only ideological positions but also more subtle, implicit appeals to partisans. Identifying and scaling a broad range of these signals in ≈2 million Twitter and Insta- gram posts from the 1,000 most popular corporate brand…

How do generative AI platforms’ content moderation policies handle the creation of political deepfakes? We evaluate how AI platforms mitigate this risk using an automated pipeline for politically diverse, externally valid evaluations of text-to-image (T2I) systems during the 2024 US Presidential election. Our system transformed media references to candidates into prompts for generative AI systems…

As generative artificial intelligence increasingly permeates most life domains, studying how the public perceives, uses, and understands AI-driven tools becomes crucial. Especially relying on generative AI for news seeking, information acquisition, and political opinion formation warrants attention from a democratic point of view. Therefore, we conduct a standardized survey of public assessments …

Understanding the spread of online rumors is a pressing soci etal challenge and an active area of research across domains. In the context of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, one influen tial social media platform for sharing information — including rumors that may be false, misleading, or unsubstantiated — was Twitter (now renamed X). To increase understanding of the dynamics of online rumors abo…

Access to information (ATI) policies are perceived as serving predominantly a government oversight function, utilized by investigative journalists and activists to reveal political corruption or misconduct. In this study, I apply text-as-data methods to 37,356 information requests submitted to the UK central government through the online participation platform WhatDoTheyKnow over a decade to expl…

Over the past few years, Twitter (now X) has become an influential platform for political discourse. However, prior research suggests that Twitter may be biased towards right-wing content. Following the change in ownership in October 2022, there have been several changes to Twitter’s policies, particularly in content flagging and Twitter Blue Verification. Understanding how any shifts in outcomes…

There is limited understanding of the user-level variables related to the common activity of repeat advice-seeking on virtual communities. Gender is of particular interest; past studies indicate men participate less on support forums. Social role theory provides descriptions of the interplay between gender roles and help-seeking, but these have not been quantified in an online context. We conduct…

This paper introduces the Twitter History and Image Sharing (THIS) datasets. These four related datasets enable the study of Twitter without the release of tweets or user information . Both are derived from a corpus of 14.596 billion geolocated tweets streamed from September 1, 2013 through March 14, 2023. Two Twitter History datasets provide data on the number of tweets, tweets by language, and …

Social media messages can elicit emotional reactions and mobilize users. Strategic utilization of emotionally charged messages, particularly those inducing fear, potentially nurtures a climate of threat and hostility online. Coined fear speech (FS), such communication deliberately portrays certain entities as imminently harmful and drives the perception of a threat, especially when the topic is a…

The affordances of the smartphone are shifting individuals toward ever smaller and more fragmented units of political experience. In this piece, we make use of a novel approach to granular assessment of political exposure on smartphones, revealing an incredible level of complexity in modern political content diets, somewhat at odds with simplifying assumptions commonly made by political communica…

The science media ecosystem continues to dramatically change with the proliferation of digital media channels and platforms. While there are many different types of digital media filling this void, the use of online videos, particularly on YouTube, has become one of the main sources for information, specifically for science and environmental issues. While most researchers examine the content of o…

Social media enables activists to directly communicate with the public and provides a space for movement leaders, participants, bystanders, and opponents to collectively construct and contest narratives. Focusing on Twitter messages from social movements surrounding three issues in 2018-2019 (guns, immigration, and LGBTQ rights), we create a codebook, annotated dataset, and computational models t…

Which topics do local administrations focus on when providing refugees and other immigrants with information about their first steps after arrival – and how well are they received? These questions are particularly important in federal systems, where regions bear significant responsibility for integration efforts, despite limited resources and a complex network of offices to navigate. This study e…