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

[Sina Furkan Özdemir]

An interesting discussion. I have done something similar for the EU's accounts before. I needed to collect twitter accounts of EU institutions and prominent figures such as commissioners and members of the European Parliament. The EU was professional enough to have all the information on a few very well designed web-pages so it was mostly a simple html scraping (I used R and rvest) to identify entities required for my project and their twitter accounts. Although, I had to validate the list by hand several times to make sure that I was getting what I wanted. 

The tricky bit was when there was no link to social media accounts on the web-pages. It turns out Google is pretty good at identifying the right social media accounts if you look up the names of these organizations or people. I did by hand because I am not well versed enough in web-scraping to integrate google searches to my script and there were not many problematic entities, but one can potentially do something like:

1) Create a list of names of organizations and people
2) Look them up on google
3) Scrape the returned page and extract the social media information
4) add the social media account information to your social media scraper.

I think step 2 and 3 can be done by using Selenium but as I said, I don't know that much about web-scraping. There is also the iffy part of scraping/crawling google...


Best,
Sina Özdemir
Ph.D. Candidate
NTNU, Trondheim
M.A Comparative and International Studies
ETH Zurich & University of Zurich, Switzerland
B.A. Political Science and International Relations
Middle East Technical University, Turkey




>-----Original Message-----
>From: Air-L <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org> On Behalf Of Ronald Rice
>Sent: Sunday, September 6, 2020 9:54 AM
>To: AoIR-L <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
>Subject: Re: [Air-L] First simple request: directory of twitter accounts for
>organizations?
>
>Thanks to some very thoughtful and generous folks who have provided
>various suggestions as well as caveats, such as the instability of sites and
>accounts, the lack of standard procedures, and multiple forms of selectivity.
>We will soon be exploring some of the suggestions, but more are welcome!  I
>will summarize and post all the suggestions and resources down the road. It's
>such a treat to be a part of the AoIR community. Thanks!
>
>On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 12:43 AM Jakob Jünger < jakob.juenger at uni-
>greifswald.de> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> interestingly, though identifying accounts is a common task, no common
>> protocols or methods have evolved so far. Cross-checking web links,
>> directories, social media search and so on is definitely nessessary to
>> get high quality lists. Each of the source brings its own bias.
>>
>> I'd like to add one point from my experience.  Some time ago,  we
>> systematically compared sampling accounts of German political
>> organizations using traditional organization directories (the Oeckl)
>> with online directories (plugragraph). The online source most likely
>> will bias your sample towards more active accounts. Depending on the
>> research question, this poses problems (for example, if you analyse
>> activity indicators such as number of posts/comments/likes/shares).
>>
>> Best
>> Jakob
>>
>> Am 06.09.2020 um 03:32 schrieb Muira McCammon:
>> > I began this journey years ago by going individually to each U.S. 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.
>>
>> --
>> Jakob Jünger
>> University of Greifswald
>> Institute of Political Science and Communication Studies
>>
>> Ernst-Lohmeyer-Platz 3
>> 17487 Greifswald
>> Germany
>>
>> Room: 3.16 (3. floor)
>> Email: jakob.juenger at uni-greifswald.de Phone : +49 3834 420 3444 or
>> +49 173 860 8056
>> Web: http://www.ipk.uni-greifswald.de/
>>
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>
>
>--
>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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