[Air-L] First simple request: directory of twitter accounts for organizations?

Sat Sep 5 18:32:33 PDT 2020

Hi, Ronald et al.,

This is an interesting thread, and Ed, thanks for sharing that post with us
all.

I'm speaking as someone, who did *not *initially automate this process of
searching for orgs' social media accounts, but one thing I wanted to add
that if you do want to get technical and/or exhaustive about this, it may
be worth using Wayback to double check that the social media accounts
currently associated with an org weren't preceded/predated by others. These
days, there's a lot of org accounts disappearing overnight with very little
heads up.

In my own case, I have spent much of the past five years searching for,
cataloguing, and tracking over approx. 2927 Twitter accounts associated
with the U.S. federal government. I built on that project this summer by
documenting all the social media accounts run by US state-level public
health departments. I don't necessarily recommend you go the manual road on
this but wanted to share a few observations from the process.

I began this journey years ago by going individually to each US fed
agency's homepage and seeing which official social media accounts were
listed. I then cross-checked this process by searching for each agency's
name in Twitter. Another level of checking entailed seeing which accounts
the govt agencies themselves were following. Some initiatives have popped
up over the years to try to keep track of govt Twitter accounts (Politwoops
and Voxgov and even Digital.gov), but they are far from exhaustive. I guess
I'm saying this, because it's good to remember that many orgs these days
will have one primary Twitter account but then will launch smaller accounts
related to specific initiatives/campaigns/etc. Often, it's really hard to
find these unless you dig into who specific accounts are following.

Anecdotally, I also wanted to add that a lot of orgs these days aren't
updating their homepages webpages to reflect the full extent of their
social media presence, in part because many are continuing to experiment
with the platforms that work best for their mission.

Muira

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 7:42 AM Shulman, Stu <stu at texifter.com> wrote:

> I would add that Maurice points to the non-trivial task of disambiguation
> when an organization name overlaps terms in common usage. For example,
> United Airlines is an organization, but it is most commonly referred to as
> United. Manchester United is a very popular football organization, most
> often referred to as United. The list of other widespread uses of this
> common organization name sums up the disambiguation problem. It can be done
> with training and machine-learning, but not for 2000 terms unless you have
> an army of workers and lots of money. That suggests a second point,
> essentially that the practical steps required to gather data for 2000
> organizations over time and remain compliant with rate and query limits
> would be daunting. You might consider trying the task with 5
> organizations to assess the challenge of performing the task at scale.
> Finally, from the view of qualitative research, depending on your end
> goals, you may not need such a huge number of organizations to reach
> saturation during analysis. That is, say you looked at 50 organizations and
> then noticed on 51-60 that you were not learning much you had not already
> learned. That is saturation.
>
> On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 6:08 AM Vergeer, M.R.M. (Maurice) <
> m.vergeer at maw.ru.nl> wrote:
>
> > Hi Ronald,
> >
> > yes it can be done, using R and the package rtweet. As for the YouTube
> > question in the other, a similar approach could be done with R and the
> > package Tuber. It probably needs a "do for" loop. Not sure rtweet
> (beware,
> > technical lingo ahead)  is vectorized for this problem.
> > A loop will take some time though, given the large number of
> > organizations. Furthermore, because one query will return multiple
> results,
> > some semi-manual evaluation needs to take place to asses which account is
> > the actual account.
> > But, anyone with some experience with R could do it.
> > Hope that herlps.
> >
> > best regards
> > Maurice
> >
> > ________________________________________________
> > Maurice Vergeer
> > www.mauricevergeer.nl
> >
> > ________________________________________________
> >
> > ________________________________________
> > Van: Air-L <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org> namens Ronald Rice <
> > rrice at comm.ucsb.edu>
> > Verzonden: zaterdag 5 september 2020 01:46
> > Aan: AoIR-L
> > Onderwerp: [Air-L] First simple request: directory of twitter accounts
> for
> > organizations?
> >
> > Hi folks.  This is an incredibly simple question, and I told my
> colleagues
> > that I was sure someone (probably many) on AoIR knows the answer to this.
> > I have a study with 2000 organizations (and their official names) and
> wish
> > to find out their main twitter account.  Twitter has a public directory,
> > but it's browse only.  I'm sure a quick script could take the table of
> org
> > names, apply it to some aspect of a twitter API or twitter database and
> > return a list. But I'm not trained in that really cool and powerful set
> of
> > approaches.  However, I'm also sure there is in fact already existing a
> > twitter directory where you could enter the organization name and get the
> > account. The paleolithic approach is to search each of the 2000 websites
> > (which we have) to see if there's a twitter account posted; or worse,
> type
> > the org name and "twitter" in Google search. Anyone have a suggestion?
> > Thanks, so much, in advance.
> > --
> > Ronald E. Rice
> > Arthur N. Rupe Professor in the Social Effects of Mass Communication
> > Department of Communication
> > 4127 SS&MS Bldg
> > Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020
> > 805-893-8696; rrice at comm.ucsb.edu
> > https://www.comm.ucsb.edu/people/ronald-e-rice
> > [image: UC Santa Barbara]
> > _______________________________________________
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>
> --
> Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
> Founder and CEO, Texifter
> Editor Emeritus, *Journal of Information Technology & Politics*
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-- 
*Muira McCammon*

*Ph.D. candidate, Annenberg School for Communication, University of
Pennsylvania M.L., University of Pennsylvania Law School (2020)M.A. in
Translation Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2016) A bit
about my research here
<https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-grad-student-studies-information-flow-Guantanamo-Bay-Gitmo-detention-center>Twitter:
@muira_mccammonPlease note that I am working more flexibly and I may send
and respond to emails out of hours - there is no expectation or desire that
you do the same. *