Understanding Police Social Media Usage Through Posts and Tweets

This data describes the use of the social media platform Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) by five (5) Massachusetts police departments over a three (3) month period from May 1st through July 31st, 2014. The five (5) police departments represented the towns/cities of Billerica, Burlington, Peabody, Waltham, and Wellesley. In addition to portraying these local trends, they demonstrate a methodology for systematically measuring social media use by government agencies or other organizations. This data was taken directly from Facebook using API’s provided by Facebook. The data includes all “wall posts” made by the representative police departments during this time period and includes data variables such as the text of the posting, the number of “likes” and “shares” (likes/shares represent features available on the Facebook social media platform), information about who performed the “like” or “share”, and comments others made in response to the “wall post”. There are 5 data files, one for each town represented. The number of variables vary per town depending on the post with the maximum number of certain features found in the row (for example, the top number of comments for one police department could be 20 while another could be 30 – the latter dataset would contain 10 more columns per row to account for the maximum possible). The data collected included the time from May 1st, 2014 through July 31st, 2014.

本数据集记录了2014年5月1日至7月31日共三个月期间，美国马萨诸塞州的5个警局对社交平台Facebook（http://www.facebook.com）的使用情况。这5个警局分别对应比勒里卡（Billerica）、伯灵顿（Burlington）、皮博迪（Peabody）、沃尔瑟姆（Waltham）以及韦尔斯利（Wellesley）五座城镇/城市的执法部门。除了直观呈现这些地方执法机构的社交平台使用趋势外，本数据集还提供了一套可系统性衡量政府机构或其他组织社交平台使用行为的标准化方法论。本数据集直接通过Facebook提供的应用程序编程接口（Application Programming Interface，API）获取自该平台，涵盖上述警局在此期间发布的全部主页帖子（wall post），包含的变量包括帖子文本内容、"点赞"与"分享"的数量（点赞/分享为Facebook社交平台的内置功能）、执行点赞或分享操作的用户信息，以及其他用户针对该主页帖子的评论内容。本数据集共包含5个数据文件，分别对应上述5个城镇的警局。不同城镇的数据文件所含变量数量存在差异，具体取决于对应警局发布的帖子情况：当部分特征的最大值出现在某一行数据时，该数据集会增设对应列数以覆盖最大可能的特征数量。例如，某一警局的单篇帖子最高评论数为20，另一警局则为30，那么后者的每行数据会比前者多10列以容纳该最大值对应的特征。本次数据采集的时间范围为2014年5月1日至2014年7月31日。