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Scholars from wide-ranging disciplines are turning to social media platforms as research sites, and as platforms expand their communicative possibilities, they create more spaces for users to enact a multitude of identities. Most platforms allow users to have 'pseudonymous' identities; that is, they can engage in practices intended to facilitate nonidentifiable content. But pseudonymity presents a series of unique challenges to the principles of anonymisation in qualitative research. This article explores the slippery nature of dealing with pseudonymous social media users' personally identifiable data during research, framed around my responses to four questions I was asked when I applied for ethical approval to conduct research with pseudonymous fan communities on social media. The four questions concern: (Q1) changing notions of 'public' and 'private' forms of data; (Q2) identifying underage and therefore vulnerable participants online; (Q3) changes to the processes of obtaining informed consent from social media users; and (Q4) the risks social media research might bring to those conducting it. This article concludes by calling for qualitative researchers and Ethics Review Boards (ERBs) to engage with institutional ethics review across the duration of a project, or at the very least to advocate for ongoing consent as research progresses, especially for (but certainly not limited to) research involving pseudonymous social media users. The article aims to be useful to other researchers facing similar dilemmas. Indeed, given the popularity of pseudonymity on social media and the growing penetration of platforms across global demographics, a need for ethical discussions of this kind is surely set to increase.

This essay argues for a paradigm shift in the study of the Internet and digital/social media. Big data analytics is the dominant paradigm. It receives large amounts of funding, is administrative and a form of digital positivism. Critical social media research is an alternative approach that combines critical social media theory, critical digital methods and critical-realist social media research ethics. Strengthening the second approach is a material question of power in academia.

"The book will become the key reference point for research practitioners and buyers as they move from their security blanket of traditional research, with its outdated notions of science and reliability, into the maelstrom that is unfolding in the post Web 2.0 world of Twitter, community panels, Facebook, and YouTube"--

Outside imagery, graphic design is largely invisible to the research fields most interested in communication campaigns, seeing negligible research conducted from a design perspective. In an era of participatory culture, social media analytics offer new ways of quantifying audience engagement, but the blurring of the boundaries between producers, consumption and audiences through the phenomenon of 'produsage' offers richer, more contextualised insights into the impact of the designed aspects of campaigns. In examining Berakar Komunikasi's campaign supporting the 2014 and 2019 election bids of Indonesia's President Jokowi Widodo, our paper examines how qualitative social media research offers fine-grained insights into the reception of campaigns. The paper raises questions about the siloed nature of research where this neglects design's relation to cultural and social phenomena, thus underscoring the need for interdisciplinary research that brings an integrated framework of concepts and approaches to knowledge production where design is concerned.

With the rise of camera-enabled cellphones and social media platforms that focus on vernacular images (e.g. Instagram™and Snapchat™), researchers and intuitional ethics boards increasingly seek guidelines for research using digital images of bodies shared on social media. This article presents the findings of in-depth interviews with 16 researchers who have received institutional ethics approval to study images of bodies shared on social media platforms. The interviews explored the researchers' (a) processes of selecting their methodologies, (b) experiences getting institutional ethics approval, and (c) personal research ethics that emerged through their research programs. The findings indicate that researchers and review boards generally lack resources. Researchers often adhered to contextual integrity, were protective while not patronizing, and adopted a feminist materialist ethics of care, which included consideration of the manifold human and nonhuman forces at play in the lifespan of images in digital research. Researchers also practiced strategies like ongoing consent, "ethics-on-the-go," ethical visual fabrication, and conscious omission.

This article showcases a detailed description of the first stage of research on the discourse of Ukrainian opinion leaders on Facebook conducted by a team of researchers representing MGIMO University, Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Institute of Economy at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Convinced that it is Facebook that serves as the primary means of communication of politicians with the population in Ukraine, the team built a data base consisting of posts written over a 10-month period by 176 profiles belonging to the representatives of Ukrainian elites, and applied machine data analysis. The research question was the following: What strategies on the conflict in Donbas are verbalized by the Ukrainian elites? The author faced three challenges and limitations of machine data processing and analysis:unsuccessful operationalization of terms; functional limitations of the Semantic Archive Platform, of which the author turned out to have unreasonably high expectations; lack of understanding of peculiarities of Big Data analysis. Nevertheless, it was the failure of this pilot research that helped raise crucial questions for further research, primarily on the criteria for shaping a data base and on formulating of the research questions for software. This experience turned to be essential for second and third stages of the research project that were completed a year and half after the project was launched. Hence the necessity to make public all the considerations on this research.

Over the past decade, Instagram has become increasingly popular and embedded in the contemporary experience of everyday feminisms. The platform allows for the co-existence of political, personal, mundane, and aesthetically-oriented content, created by both established feminist actors and "ordinary" people (i.e. not activists, career politicians, or celebrities). While feminist media studies have long studied similar practices of online feminism, historically the discipline has tended to privilege qualitative approaches, rather than more quantitatively-oriented digital methods approaches. However, the study of feminist expressions on Instagram can benefit from a critical engagement and selective embrace of some possibilities enabled by digital methods.This article offers a reflection on the use of digital methods' tools and strategies informed by a feminist media studies theoretical and epistemological lens. This draws on an exploratory case study conducted by the author, which combined qualitative and digital methods to explore a wide landscape of feminist hashtags on Portuguese Instagram. Grounded on this case, the article examines the methodological possibilities and challenges brought by digital methods, and the tensions that can arise from their combination with qualitative feminist approaches. It explores how digital analysis tools can be adopted in combination with qualitative analysis, allowing for the emergence of new insights, critical engagements with large amounts of data, intuitive explorations of datasets, while still allowing to zoom in on specific content for in-depth qualitative engagements. Finally, it also reflects on the ethical implications of a feminist approach to digital methods at the data collecting stage, positing methodological alternatives grounded on a feminist ethics of care.

There has been a recent increase in debates on the ethics of social media research, passive sensor data collection, and big data analytics. However, little evidence exists to describe how people experience and understand these applications of technology. This study aimed to passively collect data from mobile phone sensors, lapel cameras, and Bluetooth beacons to assess people's understanding and acceptance of these technologies. Seven households were purposefully sampled and data collected for 10 days. The study generated 48 hr of audio data and 30,000 images. After participant review, the data were destroyed and in-depth interviews conducted. Participants found the data collected acceptable and reported willingness to participate in similar studies. Key risks included that the camera could capture nudity and sex acts, but family review of footage before sharing helped reduce concerns. The Emanuel et al. ethics framework was found to accommodate the concerns and perspectives of study participants.

Political communication mixes communication and political science. As a field of study, it encompasses how information spreads and how it can influences politics, voters, journalists, and policy makers. Nowadays, digitalization imbues every aspect of our society, even politics. The aim of this research is to study qualitatively and quantitatively some characteristics of online political communication in order to establish some guidelines that politicians should follow if they wish to increase their popularity and visibility. Therefore I endeavoured to identify what Belgians voters prefer in terms of political communication on social media, what attributes politicians' digital output should exhibit to have a real positive impact on potential voters. Consequently, the central research question of this study is: 'How do citizens develop a preference for political personalities through their use of social media?'

"Do you want to study influencers? Opinions and comments on a collection of posts? Look at collections of photos or videos on Instagram? Qualitative Research Using Social Media guides the reader in what different kinds of qualitative research can be applied to social media data. It introduces students, as well as those who are new to the field, to developing and carrying out concrete research projects. The book takes the reader through the stages of choosing data, formulating a research question, and choosing and applying method(s). Written in a clear and accessible manner with current social media examples throughout, the book provides a step-by-step overview of a range of qualitative methods. These are presented in clear ways to show how to analyze many different types of social media content, including language and visual content such as memes, gifs, photographs and film clips. Methods examined include critical discourse analysis, content analysis, multimodal analysis, ethnography and focus groups. Most importantly, the chapters and examples show how to ask the kinds of questions that are relevant for us at this present point in our societies, where social media is highly integrated into how we live. Social media is used for political communication, social activism, as well as commercial activities and mundane everyday things, and it can transform how all these are accomplished and even what they mean. Drawing on examples from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Weibo and others, this book will be suitable for undergraduate students studying social media research courses in media and communications, as well as other humanities such as linguistics and social science based degrees"--

Social media (SM) research presents new challenges for research ethics committees (RECs) who must balance familiar ethical principles with new notions of public availability. This article qualitatively examines how U.K. REC members view this balance in terms of risk and consent. While it found significant variance overall, there were discernible experience-based trends. REC members with less experience of reviewing SM held inflexible notions of consent and risk that could be categorized as either relying on traditional notions of requiring direct consent, or viewing publicly available data as "fair game." More experienced REC members took a more nuanced approach to data use and consent. We conclude that the more nuanced approach should be best practice during ethical review of SM research.

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 amount of production data generated by social media opportunities that can be exploited by various parties, both government and private sectors to produce the information. Social media data can be used to know the behavior and public perception of the phenomenon or a particular event. To obtain and analyze social media data needed depth knowledge of Internet technology, social media, databases, data structures, information theory, data mining, machine learning, until the data and information visualization techniques. In this research, social media analysis on a particular topic and the development of prototype devices software used as a tool of social media data retrieval or retrieval of data applications. Social Media Analytics (SMA) aims to make the process of analysis and synthesis of social media data to produce information can be used by those in need. SMA process is done in three stages, namely: Capture, Understand and Present. This research is exploratorily focused on understanding the technology that became the basis of social media using various techniques exist and is already used in the study of social media analytic previously.

Provides the knowledge and tools needed for the future of survey research The survey research discipline faces unprecedented challenges, such as falling response rates, inadequate sampling frames, and antiquated approaches and tools. Addressing this changing landscape, Social Media, Sociality, and Survey Research introduces readers to a multitude of new techniques in data collection in one of the fastest developing areas of survey research. The book is organized around the central idea of a ""sociality hierarchy"" in social media interactions, comprised of three le

This article evaluates whether we can use process-oriented theory to conduct comparative, historical social media research. There is a lack of theoretically informed approaches to studying recently digitized historical text with contemporary social media. This article argues that such perspectives are needed and extends Norbert Elias' notions of 'sociogenesis' and 'psychogenesis' into data-driven research. Canonical process-oriented researchers such as Elias used mixed-methods approaches, including visual maps and quantitative surveys. By comparing 17th-century digitized diaries and 5 million digitized books from Google Books with contemporary tweet data, this study provides a successful case of comparing tweets with historical printed text at a big data scale. Moreover, quantitative methods are important to process-oriented methodologies and can be extended to big data empirical sources. An important finding is that there are similarities in the curation of everyday life in elite historical diaries and in more democratic forms of contemporary social media. Although accessibility and volume of content have changed over time from historical text to tweets, we found that there is a marked preference for certain words associated with communal sentiment over the centuries.