Therefore, social media data is of great importance not only to social researchers but also to decision makers in the context of political opinion formation, crisis management, information quality , geopolitical events or security concerns.
Social media are perceived as central platforms for opinion formation, public participation and triggering political and societal change. Our findings illustrate the critical limitations and general issues of big data sampling, especially in the context of proprietary data and undisclosed details about data handling. Samples should therefore not be regarded as random. Our analysis also reveals that technical artifacts can accidentally skew Twitter’s samples. However, we demonstrate that, due to the nature of Twitter’s sampling mechanism, it is possible to deliberately influence these samples, the extent and content of any topic, and consequently to manipulate the analyses of researchers, journalists, as well as market and political analysts trusting these data sources. These data are supposedly random samples of all platform activity. One of which, Twitter’s Sample API, provides a freely available 1% and a costly 10% sample of all Tweets. Twitter offers data via three different Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Twitter, one of the largest social media platforms, is used for research, journalism, business, and government to analyze human behavior at scale. Social media data is widely analyzed in computational social science.
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