How to Compare Different Social Media: A Conceptual and Technical Framework

Abstract

Social media research has gained traction during the last 10 years within Internet research and digital sociology. However, due to methodological and technical difficulties studies have mainly focused on analyzing only one platform per study (often Twitter or Facebook), especially when the study involves analysis of large public or private data streams (e.g., Bechmann. J Media Bus Stud 11(1):21–38, 2013; Bechmann. Managing the interoperable self. In: Bechmann A, Lomborg S. The ubiquitous internet: user and industry perspectives. Routledge, New York, pp 54–73, 2015; Boyd and Marwick. Social privacy in networked publics: teens attitudes, practices, and strategies. In: Proceedings of a decade in internet time, 21–24 September 2011, University of Oxford, 2011; Fernandes et al. Mass Commun Soc 13(5):653–675, 2010; Marichal. First Monday, 12(2), 2013; Lotan et al. Int J Commun 5:1375–1405, 2011; Wu et al. Who says what to whom on Twitter. In: Proceedings of the international World Wide Web conference (WWW 2011), pp 705–714, 2011; Bruns and Burgess. J Stud 13:801–814, 2012). The fact that such data streams are accessed through different application programming interfaces (APIs) that have their own different logics means that complexity increases at a technical level.