The final speakers at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library for today are Oliver Watteler and Jan Schwalbach, whose interest is in the legal conditions for sharing platform data; platforms’ developer policies and Terms of Service are in constant flux, so it is important to keep track of how they evolve over time.

Researchers often have a strong interest in sharing the datasets they have collected with others; data sharing aids replicability, speeds up the research process, and enables new work. But researchers are rarely aware of the frameworks the platforms have imposed on such sharing …

The next speaker at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Robert Jäschke. He begins by noting the legal constraints on social media data sharing, including Terms of Service, copyright, and other restrictions. One approach to managing this is the way Twitter approached this: sharing datasets with lists of tweet IDs without any further content was allowed, and researchers then needed to ‘rehydrate’ them by regathering the tweet data. Another approach is to share only aggregate metrics rather than the source data themselves; or to share derived datasets (like term matrices, n-gram datasets, or word embeddings) …

Day Two at the Social Media Access Days in Frankfurt starts with my keynote, taking stock of how we access and engage with social media data nearly ten years after the drastic changes to many platforms' data access regimes following the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. Back then, I wrote an article for Information, Communication & Society about the APIcalypse; how have things developed since then?

Here are my slides from the talk:

The next speakers in this session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library are Gabriel Viehhauser and Carl Friedrich Haak, whose interest is in making use of donated social media data – the concrete context here is that the Austrian author Clemens J. Setz, who has at times posted some of his short-form work on Twitter, has donated his archive of tweets to a library in Vienna, which was unsure about what to do with this gift.

Such work is diverse in its formats; further, Setz is author, but also interlocutor, curator, recipient, object of mentions …

I was the final speaker in this first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting a longitudinal study of ten years of the #auspol hashtag on what was then still Twitter. Our central interest here, in particular, was whether the extremely active #auspol userbase could be considered a genuine online community, or was merely a group of political junkies all shouting voluminously into the void.

Our slides are below:

I’m speaking in the next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, which is on deliberation and polarisation, but we begin with Hilke Brockmann, whose focus is on ‘echo chambers’ amongst political elites. These are believed to be a risk to democratic processes, and driven by algorithmic processes; but these ideas have rightly been challenged in recent years. We would do better to focus on polarised interactions between political elites, and especially on the margins of the political environment, and this may be intensified by external political events.

The present study examined this by assessing tweets by all …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Zeyu Zhu, whose interest is in global communication on Twitter between 2012 and 2022. We lack a systematic empirical description of global communication over this decade, which saw a rise of the Global South as documented in politics and economics, but is less well documented communication research.

This project works with a dataset drawn from the 1% real-time Twitter sample as available from the Internet archive; accounts captured in this dataset were geolocated based on their profiles using the Nominatim software; and retweet actions were then …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Ivan Paganotti, whose interest is in Brazil’s suspension of Xitter in August to October 2024 as a result of its non-compliance with Brazilian court rulings on media regulation. The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court has been quite active in the field of media regulation, and its suspension of Xitter has set a precedent that may also be of relevance to other jurisdictions.

Xitter had been found to be non-compliant with Brazilian court rulings on blocking and removing the profiles of far-right influencers who were undermining its democratic …