Beyond Twitter: Exploring Alternative API Sources for Social Media Analytics

Alina Campan, Noah Holtke

2024

Abstract

Social media is a valuable source of data for applications in a multitude of fields: agriculture, banking, business intelligence, communication, disaster management, education, government, health, hospitality and tourism, journalism, management, marketing, etc. There are two main ways to collect social media data: web scraping (requires more complex custom programs, faces legal and ethical concerns) and API-scraping using services provided by the social media platform itself (clear protocols, clean data, follows platform established rules). However, API-based access to social media platforms has significantly changed in the last few years, with the mainstream platforms placing more restrictions and pricing researchers out. At the same time, new, federated social media platforms have emerged, many of which have a growing user base and could be valuable data sources for research. In this paper, we describe an experimental framework to API-scrape data from the federated Mastodon platform (specifically its flagship node, Mastodon.social), and the results of volume, sentiment, emotion, and topic analysis on two datasets we collected – as a proof of concept for the usefulness of sourcing data from the Mastodon platform.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Campan A. and Holtke N. (2024). Beyond Twitter: Exploring Alternative API Sources for Social Media Analytics. In Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 1: KDIR; ISBN 978-989-758-716-0, SciTePress, pages 441-447. DOI: 10.5220/0013035600003838

in Bibtex Style

@conference{kdir24,
author={Alina Campan and Noah Holtke},
title={Beyond Twitter: Exploring Alternative API Sources for Social Media Analytics},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 1: KDIR},
year={2024},
pages={441-447},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013035600003838},
isbn={978-989-758-716-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 1: KDIR
TI - Beyond Twitter: Exploring Alternative API Sources for Social Media Analytics
SN - 978-989-758-716-0
AU - Campan A.
AU - Holtke N.
PY - 2024
SP - 441
EP - 447
DO - 10.5220/0013035600003838
PB - SciTePress