Digital Total - Computing & Data Science an der Universität Hamburg und in der Wissenschaftsmetropole Hamburg

Augmenting Social Media Actor Lists with Explorative Network Sampling: Mapping German Right-wing Counterpublics on Twitter

14

Nicht eingeplant

20m

Von-Melle-Park 4

Poster

Beschreibung

Our research addresses the challenge of accurately classifying far-right extremist accounts on Twitter/X or comparable platforms on a large scale to provide a comprehensive view of the digital far-right ecosystem. Traditional approaches rely on precise but limited account lists, leading to incomplete insights, especially for new or less popular accounts. In response, we present a mixed method approach using network sampling, utilising our self-developed tool, Ponyexpress. We apply a variety of topology-based network sampling methods to sample accounts within right-wing counterpublics in the German Twittersphere. The study evaluates the precision and recall of these methods and maps the results to the overall network structure. Our findings indicate the effectiveness of specific sampling strategies such as combining k-cores with snowball sampling.

Keywords

data mining
digital traces
social networks
network sampling
right-wing counterpublics