Social media in the Global South: A Network Dataset of the Malian Twittersphere
Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities(2023)
摘要
With the expansion of mobile communications infrastructure, social media
usage in the Global South is surging. Compared to the Global North, populations
of the Global South have had less prior experience with social media from
stationary computers and wired Internet. Many countries are experiencing
violent conflicts that have a profound effect on their societies. As a result,
social networks develop under different conditions than elsewhere, and our goal
is to provide data for studying this phenomenon. In this dataset paper, we
present a data collection of a national Twittersphere in a West African country
of conflict. While not the largest social network in terms of users, Twitter is
an important platform where people engage in public discussion. The focus is on
Mali, a country beset by conflict since 2012 that has recently had a relatively
precarious media ecology. The dataset consists of tweets and Twitter users in
Mali and was collected in June 2022, when the Malian conflict became more
violent internally both towards external and international actors. In a
preliminary analysis, we assume that the conflictual context influences how
people access social media and, therefore, the shape of the Twittersphere and
its characteristics. The aim of this paper is to primarily invite researchers
from various disciplines including complex networks and social sciences
scholars to explore the data at hand further. We collected the dataset using a
scraping strategy of the follower network and the identification of
characteristics of a Malian Twitter user. The given snapshot of the Malian
Twitter follower network contains around seven million accounts, of which
56,000 are clearly identifiable as Malian. In addition, we present the tweets.
The dataset is available at: https://osf.io/mj2qt/
更多查看译文
关键词
malian twittersphere,social media,global south,network dataset
AI 理解论文
溯源树
样例
生成溯源树,研究论文发展脉络
Chat Paper
正在生成论文摘要