Exploratory data analysis of alt-right Twitter

[gati]

Recently @ccarey created a network and pulled down recent tweets for the current alt-right presence on Twitter. This is issue to begin exploring that datasets - topic modeling, network modeling, social media analytics, and/or whatever techniques for exploring network and text data you're comfortable with.

Ping @bstarling (in Slack) to get credentials for accessing the database!

[divyanair91]

I'm gonna hop on this one!

[ccarey]

Just to give some background on how this was collected: I had a list of 133 known alt-right / white nationalist Twitter accounts, of which 130 were currently active / not suspended. From that list of 130 "seed" accounts, I also grabbed all users those accounts were following, for a total of ~40,000 users in the database. I then grabbed the 200 most recent tweets from all ~40,000 of those users.

The code used to create the database can be found here: https://github.com/Data4Democracy/collect-social

I also found this stackoverflow question to be super helpful in finding my way around the database: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4654762/how-can-one-see-the-structure-of-a-table-in-sqlite

Very excited to see this dataset being put to good use 😄

[jason-lange]

@ccarey thanks for sharing your work. how did you decide which 133 accounts would be your seeds? I'm interested in analyzing activity of far right twitter users based on seed accounts. I'm looking for ways/ideas on how to define a list of seeds using only a few rules. I'm a journalist so I have to keep my methodology simple. thanks!