Social Media Observatory

Gain the technical skills to monitor millions of social media accounts for a panoramic view of online communities.

How can we analyze the billions of social media posts published daily online? For engineers, scholars, activists, or citizen scientists, this book is an in-depth guide to coding web applications that monitor discourse on social media platforms.

You’ll first set up a working observatory for Twitter, then incorporate Instagram and Telegram. You’ll detect Twitter bots via account birth charts, extract text-embedded URLs for analysis, plot interactive Telegram networks to enumerate media bubbles, and map the structure of a social movement on Instagram. Finally, you’ll deploy your observatory to a remote server to collaborate with other investigators. You’ll:



Use Python libraries to retrieve Twitter data from a remote API

Scrape archival data from the Wayback Machine

Analyze the data you’ve retrieved with PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, and other tools

Store data in a relational database

Create and securely deploy an interactive dashboard for data collection and analysis in the cloud

Modify your observatory’s functionality to suit your needs



By the end of the book, you’ll have a working website that allows team members to log in, request data collection, and perform analysis of collected data, via an intuitive and user-friendly interface. Get a bird’s eye view of the social and political discourses of our time and empower yourself to reach your own conclusions.