Damian Trilling: Studying Likes and Shares on semi-public social media: What data can we get, how can we do it, and what did we learn so far?

Damian Trilling (University of Amsterdam) will present today, titled: Studying Likes and Shares on semi-public social media: What data can we get, how can we do it, and what did we learn so far?

Abstract:
More and more news and political information reaches citizens via social media. This is not to say that - as early proponents of "citizen journalism" expected two decades ago - people massively produce their own news- or politics-related content. Rather, they massively share links to news articles produced by others: mainly traditional news media, but also sources of doubtful quality, even dis- and misinformation.To understand which news reaches which (groups of) citizens, we therefore must also understand what is "liked" and "shared" on social media. In this talk, Damian Trilling first gives an overview of previous research on the "shareworthiness" of onine news. Then he discusses the challenges of collecting data to conduct such research and gives a glimpse into the kitchen of his current, multi-country project that (with a SocialScienceOne-grant) got access to new privacy-protecting research enironment for Facebook data (http://ccs.amsterdam/projects/sharenews-predicting-the-shareworthiness-of-real-and-fake-news-in-europe/ )

Lunch is served at first come, first served basis.