Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Montréal, 12 Oct. 2018.

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AoIR 2018, Montréal, 12 Oct. 2018
Axel Bruns | @snurb_dot_info
A Multi-Institutional Approach to ‘Big Social Data’
The TrISMA Project

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TrISMA: Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis
● TrISMA:
● ARC LIEF project, 2014-16
● QUT, Curtin, Deakin, Swinburne, NLA (+ ECU, Sydney, WSU)
● Now maintained by the QUT Digital Observatory
● Key capabilities:
● Australian Twitter Collection: live tracker of 500,000 most active Twitter
accounts
● Australian Twittersphere network: follower relations between 3.7m Australian
Twitter accounts
● Australian Facebook Collection: activity on public Australian Facebook pages

3. Capabilities: Twitter

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The Australian Twittersphere
● Twitter in Australia:
● Strong take-up since 2009
● Centred around 25-55 age range, urban, educated, affluent users (but gradually broadening)
● Significant role in crisis communication, political communication, audience engagement, …
● Mapping the Twittersphere:
● Long-term project to identify all Australian Twitter accounts
● First iteration: snowball crawl of follower/followee networks
● Starting with key hashtag populations (#auspol, #spill, …)
● Map of ~1m accounts in early 2012
● Second iteration: full crawl of global Twitter ID numberspace through to Sep. 2013 (~870m accounts)
● Third iteration: full crawl of global Twitter ID numberspace through to Feb. 2016 (~1.4b accounts)
● Filtering by description, location, timezone fields: identifiably Australian cities, states, timezones, etc.
● 4 million Australian accounts identified (by Feb. 2016)
● Retrieval of their follower/followee lists
● Continuous gathering of public tweets for the 500,000 most active accounts
● Capturing ~900,000 new tweets per day

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Global Growth

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3.7m known Australian accounts
Network of follower connections
Filtered for degree ≥1000
255k nodes (6.4%), 61m edges
Edges not shown in graph
The Australian Twittersphere
Teen Culture
Aspirational
Sports
Netizens
Arts & Culture
Politics
Television
Fashion
Popular Music
Food & Drinks
Agriculture Activism
Porn
Education
Cycling
News &
Generic
Hard Right
Progressive
South
Australia
Celebrities
Horse Racing

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(http://bit.ly/QUTDOTwitter)

8. Benefits and Challenges

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What’s Wrong with Hashtag Studies?
● Hashtag (and keyword) studies:
● Hashtags (often) fail to capture follow-on communication
● Hashtag studies lack context: e.g. what percentage of total tweet volume?
● Only ~18% of tweets by the top 500,000 Australian accounts contain hashtags
● Which hashtags, which keywords?
● Live Twitter API data collection assumes we know tracking terms a priori
● Need for comparative, whole-of-population studies across topics
● What do Australian (not global) Twitter users tweet about?
● It’s the network, stupid:
● Twitter follower relations crucial to message spread and visibility
● Most studies observe activity, not reach: talking, not listening
● Follower network data can show which thematic clusters are active,
● and which are likely to have seen relevant posts

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‘Big Social Data’ after the APIcalypse
● Growing challenges:
● Refreshing the data – 2016 accounts; account IDs no longer consecutive
● Continuous snowballing – add accounts mentioned by tracked accounts?
● Continuing, unforeseeable, inherently anti-researcher API changes
● TrISMA maintenance and management:
● Costly data gathering, storage, processing, and maintenance
● QUT Digital Observatory as long-term investment (well beyond Twitter)
● Need for considerable digital methods research training
● Multi-institutional research project vs. Twitter Terms of Service?
● Twitter Terms of Service vs. public-interest research needs

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Intransparency Spun as Data Protection
● The API clampdown:
● Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, … reducing API functionality and access
● Mounting casualities: Netvizz, Texifter, … (but not the commercial services?)
● Spin: ‘we are doing more to protect your data’ after Cambridge Analytica
● Reality: ‘we are doing more to frustrate independent, critical, public-interest scrutiny’
● Hiding problems (hate speech, bullying, ‘fake news’), rather than addressing them
● What can we do?
● Give up, walk away, research other things
● Protest, lobby companies for access, lobby legislators for pro-research regulation
● Use what remains of the APIs to gather what we can, and (carefully) share what we gather
● Build shared repositories for our social media datasets, and develop ethical access frameworks
● Explore scraping and other alternatives even if they break the ToS, in the public interest
(IT University Copenhagen, 27-28 Oct. 2018)

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AoIR 2018, Montréal, 12 Oct. 2018
Axel Bruns | @snurb_dot_info
@snurb_dot_info – http://snurb.info/
@socialmediaQUT – http://socialmedia.qut.edu.au/
@qutdmrc – https://www.qut.edu.au/research/dmrc
This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project
“Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian
Online Public Sphere”, and the ARC LIEF project “TrISMA:
Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis.”