Show & Tell Report | 03. June 2025

Workshop Report: Lecture and Discussion Series “Social Media Data: Show & Tell – Research on Right-Wing Extremism and Democracy (2)” (online)

By Dr. Vincent Fröhlich

Since early 2022, the working group Social Media Data in Research Practice—an initiative by NFDI4Culture in collaboration with BERD@NFDI, KonsortSWD, and Text+ within the framework of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI)—has been organizing the lecture and discussion series Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice.

Each session of this ongoing series takes the form of a 90-minute Zoom event focused on tools and practices in the field of social media research. The format showcases best practices from selected projects and addresses pragmatic solutions and technical challenges (e.g., interfaces, repositories, metadata standards, interoperability), as well as ethical and legal issues (such as personal rights and copyright) in the sustainable, secure, and critical use of social media data (Code and Data Literacy, FAIR & CARE principles). In addition, the series invites reflection on interdisciplinary approaches and teaching formats that challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries and established methodological frameworks.

In 2025, the series places a special emphasis on the use of social media data in the context of research on right-wing extremism and democracy.

The second session on 25 April 2025 featured contributions by Prof. Dr. Jasmin Riedl (University of the Bundeswehr Munich) as well as Isabel Bezzaoui and Ina Ni (FZI Research Center for Information Technology). Both presentations offered in-depth insights into the methodological, ethical, and infrastructural challenges of data-driven democracy research using social media.

Prof. Dr. Jasmin Riedl: SPARTA – Social Media Analysis for Everyone

The SPARTA project aims to enable social media analyses without requiring programming skills—particularly for researchers who have so far been excluded due to a lack of expertise in Python, limited computational resources, or restricted access to data. At the heart of the project is the development of an accessible, user-friendly analysis lab that allows researchers to implement their own investigations via so-called “no-code” workflows. One illustrative use case involved a master's student analyzing aggressive rhetoric about the Afghanistan withdrawal on X/Twitter in multiple languages—without writing a single line of code.

SPARTA relies on modular microservices for visualization, topic modeling, multimodal image and network analysis, stance detection, and custom-trained language models. A notable component is its live monitoring of elections, crises, and misinformation—e.g., the 2021 and 2025 German federal elections, the Ahrtal flood, and the war in Ukraine—drawing on over 500 million analyzed posts from platforms such as X, TikTok, and YouTube.

External researchers can access SPARTA's infrastructure through formal integration into the project, granting them a dedicated developer pod on the analysis cluster—a key step toward democratizing computational social science.

Isabel Bezzaoui and Ina Ni: Digital Democracy and Social Media

The FZI team presented three interrelated initiatives addressing digital threats to democracy: SOSEC, DeFaktS, and MuDDi.

SOSEC – Social Sentiment in Times of Crises regularly captures public sentiment using biweekly panel surveys in Germany and the US (1,500 participants each) and combines these data with social media analyses of current events. The goal is to identify early-warning indicators of democratic erosion or tipping points—e.g., divergent reactions to President Biden’s visit to Kyiv across Reddit and X.

DeFaktS focuses on disinformation. The project extracts content from suspicious platforms and messaging groups, applies AI-based classifications, and develops explainable AI components that render algorithmic decisions transparent and interpretable.

MuDDi explores multimodal deepfake detection by integrating biometric pulse analysis, image watermark and visual feature recognition, and linguistic coherence checks to deliver a holistic assessment.

All three projects embrace a circular approach to data usage: social media data not only serve as training material for the models but are also the field of application and testing. The research is supported by the House of Participation (KIT), which engages broader publics through initiatives such as the Hopcast, Hop Roundtable, and the Hop Conference.

Discussion and Outlook

The final discussion with the audience once again emphasized structural challenges, including ethical concerns, legal uncertainties, and infrastructural needs. The seven guiding questions for working with social media data will soon be published via the Knowledge Base.

The next session of the series will take place on Friday, 20 June 2025, at 2:00 p.m., featuring contributions by Prof. Dr. Julia Bee, Dr. Elena Pilipets und Stephen Albrecht (NEOVEX).

A collaboration of

BERD@NFDI – NFDI Consortium for Business, Economic and Related Data
KonsortSWD – Consortium for the Social, Behavioral, Educational, and Economic Sciences
NFDI4Culture – Consortium for Research Data on Tangible and Intangible Cultural Assets
Text+ – Consortium for Text- and Language-Based Research Data

Coordinators
Vincent Fröhlich (vincent.froehlich(at)staff.uni-marburg(dot)de)
Philippe Genêt (P.Genet(at)dnb(dot)de)

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