IU's Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe) has created a dashboard to track midterm election information across social media platforms. This database is to aid social media companies, journalists and voters in overcoming challenges related to election misinformation.
It was important to make this information available to the public, said Bao Tran Truong, a research assistant at OSoMe and doctoral candidate in informatics.
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“We collect data of conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram,” Truong said. “If a person knows nothing about the midterm [elections], they can go into this dashboard and see how it's being talked about on social media.”
The dashboard disseminates election-related content shared by different accounts. The tracker also displays the top-used hashtags and images on these platforms.
“The main purpose is to collect data about social media activity revolving around the midterm elections, and that will be used later for research. our goal is to publish a dataset paper,” Truong said. “But we also want to make [the dashboard] available to the public because some of the information will be of interest to journalists, or just people who are interested about [midterm election information across social media platforms].”
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For additional information about OSoMe and the dashboard, visit osome.iu.edu.
