Social Media Data

Catalog description

In this course students will develop an understanding of how social media platforms function as sites of communication and connection. Students will look at the designs of platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit, among others, and how users interact with the platform to create space for themselves. Students will learn to scrape data from various platforms in both manual collection and Python code in order to understand how the technological structure of these platforms constrain users, and how users push back on these limitations. We will examine these topics with a focus on algorithmic bias, technological affordances, digital identity, and toxic subcultures. Offered regularly. Restrictions: Watson and SOM students are by permission of instructor.