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This chapter discusses the legal aspects of researchers' access to social media data, focusing in particular on recent developments in European law. We see law as playing both an enabling and a restrictive role in facilitating platform data access. Identifying a number of shortcomings in current legislation, we argue for the creation of a sound legal framework for scholarly data research. The new Digital Services Act makes some promising first steps towards regulating programmatic data access through APIs, but many obstacles and ambiguities remain. Furthermore, a clear vision on the legal status of public interest scraping projects is still lacking. In the teeth of private ordering by global platform companies, as new gatekeepers in academic research, ensuring fair and rights-sensitive data access must be a priority for the (European) legislator.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. The benefits of controversial political issues (CPI) -- 2. The Israeli context -- 3. Alone in the forefront: Challenges in teaching CPI in the era of polarization and social media -- 4. What stops teachers from talking about CPI? -- 5. Teachers in different political and cultural contexts -- 6. Teachers' professional identities and role dilemmas -- 7. Teachers' emotional role in CPI discussions -- 8. Understanding the students: A developmental approach -- 9. Recommended strategies for effectively handling CPI -- 10. Summary and conclusions -- Appendix: Research designs and methodologies -- Index.

Sharing social media research datasets allows for reproducibility and peer-review, but it is very often difficult or even impossible to achieve due to legal restrictions and can also be ethically questionable. What is more, research data repositories and other research infrastructure and research support institutions are only starting to target social media researchers. In this paper, we present a practical solution to sharing social media data with the help of a social science data archive. Our aim is to contribute to the effort of enhancing comparability and reproducibility in social media research by taking some first steps towards setting standards for sustainable data archiving. We present a showcase for sharing social media data with the example of a big dataset containing geotagged tweets (several months of continued geotagged tweets from the United States from 2014 and 2015; nearly half a billion tweets in total) through a research data archive. We provide a general background to the process of long-term archiving of research data. After some consideration of the current obstacles for sharing and archiving social media data, we present our solution of archiving the specific dataset of geotagged tweets at the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences, a publicly funded German data archive for secure and long-term archiving of social science data. We archived and documented tweet IDs and additional information to improve reproducibility of the initial research while also attending to ethical and legal considerations, and taking into account Twitter's terms of service in particular.

The objectives of this work were to discover the main points of interest in the field of research on Social Media, within the scientific area of Communication, and to analyse how it has evolved. A methodology based on the analysis of co-words and visualisation techniques was applied. The data was obtained from scientific publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database, during the periods 2008-2012 and 2013-2017. The resulting maps showed that, during the period 2008-2012, the main areas of interest were web 2.0 and the internet in terms of social networking sites. However, during the period 2013-2017, there was a strong upward trend in the impact of social networks and platforms, especially Twitter and Facebook, in many areas (such as social movements, public relations and publicity, distribution of content, crisis communication, participatory journalism, political communication, or the configuration of public identities through social platforms, with special emphasis on youth). Finally, new scientific challenges were found in automatic analysis of content and management of big data. In conclusion, it was possible to transform a complex, underlying, dynamic and multidimensional reality into visible representations that could help experts in the field to better understand the evolution of research on Social Media.

The objectives of this work were to discover the main points of interest in the field of research on Social Media, within the scientific area of Communication, and to analyse how it has evolved. A methodology based on the analysis of co-words and visualisation techniques was applied. The data was obtained from scientific publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database, during the periods 2008-2012 and 2013-2017. The resulting maps showed that, during the period 2008-2012, the main areas of interest were web 2.0 and the internet in terms of social networking sites. However, during the period 2013-2017, there was a strong upward trend in the impact of social networks and platforms, especially Twitter and Facebook, in many areas (such as social movements, public relations and publicity, distribution of content, crisis communication, participatory journalism, political communication, or the configuration of public identities through social platforms, with special emphasis on youth). Finally, new scientific challenges were found in automatic analysis of content and management of big data. In conclusion, it was possible to transform a complex, underlying, dynamic and multidimensional reality into visible representations that could help experts in the field to better understand the evolution of research on Social Media. ; Los objetivos de este trabajo fueron descubrir los principales focos de interés del campo de investigación de los Social Media, dentro del área científica de la Comunicación, y analizar la dinámica de su evolución. Se aplicó una metodología basada en el análisis de co-palabras y en técnicas de visualización. Los datos se obtuvieron de las publicaciones científicas indexadas en la base de datos Web of Science (WoS), durante los períodos temporales 2008-2012 y 2013-2017. Los mapas resultantes mostraron que durante el período 2008-2012 las principales áreas de interés fueron la web 2.0 y el uso de Internet en el ámbito de los medios de comunicación. Sin embargo, durante el período 2013-2017 se apreció una fuerte tendencia ascendente del impacto de las redes y las plataformas sociales, especialmente Twitter y Facebook, en numerosas áreas, tales como los movimientos sociales, las relaciones públicas y la publicidad, la difusión de contenidos, la comunicación de crisis, el periodismo participativo, la comunicación política o la configuración de las identidades públicas a través de las plataforma sociales, con especial incidencia en los adolescentes. Por último, los nuevos retos científicos se situaron en el análisis automático de contenidos y en la gestión de datos masivos, o big data. En conclusión, se consiguió transformar una realidad compleja, subyacente, dinámica y multidimensional en representaciones visibles que podrían ayudar a una mejor comprensión de la evolución del campo de investigación de los Social Media por parte de los expertos en la materia.

The objectives of this work were to discover the main points of interest in the field of research on Social Media, within the scientific area of Communication, and to analyse how it has evolved. A methodology based on the analysis of co-words and visualisation techniques was applied. The data was obtained from scientific publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database, during the periods 2008-2012 and 2013-2017. The resulting maps showed that, during the period 2008-2012, the main areas of interest were web 2.0 and the internet in terms of social networking sites. However, during the period 2013-2017, there was a strong upward trend in the impact of social networks and platforms, especially Twitter and Facebook, in many areas (such as social movements, public relations and publicity, distribution of content, crisis communication, participatory journalism, political communication, or the configuration of public identities through social platforms, with special emphasis on youth). Finally, new scientific challenges were found in automatic analysis of content and management of big data. In conclusion, it was possible to transform a complex, underlying, dynamic and multidimensional reality into visible representations that could help experts in the field to better understand the evolution of research on Social Media. ; Los objetivos de este trabajo fueron descubrir los principales focos de interés del campo de investigación de los Social Media, dentro del área científica de la Comunicación, y analizar la dinámica de su evolución. Se aplicó una metodología basada en el análisis de co-palabras y en técnicas de visualización. Los datos se obtuvieron de las publicaciones científicas indexadas en la base de datos Web of Science (WoS), durante los períodos temporales 2008-2012 y 2013-2017. Los mapas resultantes mostraron que durante el período 2008-2012 las principales áreas de interés fueron la web 2.0 y el uso de Internet en el ámbito de los medios de comunicación. Sin embargo, durante el período 2013-2017 se apreció una fuerte tendencia ascendente del impacto de las redes y las plataformas sociales, especialmente Twitter y Facebook, en numerosas áreas, tales como los movimientos sociales, las relaciones públicas y la publicidad, la difusión de contenidos, la comunicación de crisis, el periodismo participativo, la comunicación política o la configuración de las identidades públicas a través de las plataforma sociales, con especial incidencia en los adolescentes. Por último, los nuevos retos científicos se situaron en el análisis automático de contenidos y en la gestión de datos masivos, o big data. En conclusión, se consiguió transformar una realidad compleja, subyacente, dinámica y multidimensional en representaciones visibles que podrían ayudar a una mejor comprensión de la evolución del campo de investigación de los Social Media por parte de los expertos en la materia.

This article reports on a U.K. workshop on social media research ethics held in May 2018. There were 10 expert speakers and an audience of researchers, research ethics committee members, and research institution representatives. Participants reviewed the current state of social media ethics, discussing well-rehearsed questions such as what needs consent in social media research, and how the public/private divide differs between virtual and real-life environments. The lack of answers to such questions was noted, along with the difficulties posed for ethical governance structures in general and the work of research ethics committees in particular. Discussions of these issues enabled the creation of two recommendations. The first is for research ethics committees and journal editors to add the category of 'data subject research' to the existing categories of 'text research' and 'human subject research'. This would reflect the fact that social media research does not fall into either of the existing categories and so needs a category of its own. The second is that ethical issues should be considered at all stages of social media research, up to and including aftercare. This acknowledges that social media research throws up a large number of ethical issues throughout the process which, under current arrangements for ethical research governance, risks remaining unaddressed.

"Drawing together the new techniques available to the market researcher into a single reference, The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research explores how these innovations are being used by the leaders in the field. This groundbreaking reference examines why traditional research is broken, both in theory and practice, and includes chapters on online research communities, community panels, blog mining, social networks, mobile research, e-ethnography, predictive markets, and DIY research"--Provided by publisher.

Facebook has frequently been implicated in the 2016 'Brexit' referendum result, and support for Leave has been linked to wider nativist and populist mobilisations online. However, close-up, qualitative sociological research has not been conducted into the relationship between Brexit and social media use. This is, in part, due to the computational turn in online research, which has led to a disproportionate focus on quantitative big data analysis. This article argues for the value of close-up, qualitative enquiry to facilitate situated understandings of the reality of social media use and what it means to individuals. It outlines one such methodology developed to investigate pro-Leave Facebook users, to demonstrate how challenges posed by such research can be overcome, and the opportunities such enquiry affords for studying the role of social media in contentious politics. Invaluable insights gained include the way Facebook provides an empowering tool for making claims to political knowledge in the context of growing transnational nativist and populist grievances.