[Air-L] The Gab project. Scraping & analysing the far-right platform Gab.com

[Schaefer, M.T. (Mirko)]

Dear list,

A few years ago, Data School<https://dataschool.nl/en/> started to investigate the far-right platform Gab. In order to do so, our team scraped all messages posted to the platform. Tim de Winkel<https://www.internationalhu.com/research/researchers/tim-de-winkel> wrote his PhD thesis<https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/430642> on fringe platforms, and Gab was an apt case study.

The project was rather complex and can serve as an example of how to capture data from fringe platforms (no documented API's), how to tackle the legal and ethical issues involved, and how to apply digital methods for analysis. We developed a range of different inquiries for understanding a platform's dynamics, infrastructure, economics and ideology. This overview article summarizes the project and discusses the technical, legal and ethical, and the epistemological challenges. The article appeared in the recent edition of the open access Journal for Right-Wing Studies<https://jrws.berkeley.edu/>:

De Winkel, Tim, Ludo Gorzeman, Sofie de Wilde de Ligny, Thomas ten Heuvel, Melissa Blekkenhorst, Sander Prins, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer. "The Gab Project: The Methodological, Epistemological, and Legal Challenges of Studying the Platformized Far-Right." Journal of Right-Wing Studies 2, no. 1 (2024).
https://escholarship.org/content/qt8k51x134/qt8k51x134.pdf?t=sfzp36

Best wishes,
mirko