Social Media Monitoring for the German federal election 2017

Social Media Monitoring of the German Federal Election Campaign 2017

This dataset contains results from the social media monitoring of Facebook and Twitter for the German federal election campaign 2017. The project collected the tweets and Facebook posts of political candidates and organizations and the engagement of users with these contents – retweets and @-mentions on Twitter, comments, shares and likes on Facebook. Finally, all messages on Twitter containing at least one keyword denoting central political topics were collected. All data was publicly available at the time of data collection. The collected data is proprietary and owned by Facebook and Twitter. Due to this and with respect to privacy restrictions, only the following aspects of the data can be shared:

(1) A list of all candidates that were considered in the project, their key attributes and the identification of their respective Twitter accounts and Facebook pages.

Candidate dataset: Full surname, all first names of the candidate; academic title and name pre- or suffixes (if they exist); URL of the first Facebook account; URL of the second Facebook account; URL of the Twitter account; candidate is placed on a party list; candidate’s place on the party list; candidate is a direct candidate in one of the constituencies; official number and official name of the constituency in which the candidate is running for a direct mandate; state; candidate is a member of the federal parliament (Bundestag); party of the candidate; sex, age (year of birth); place of residence; place of birth; profession.

Additionally coded was: unique ID.

(2) Lists of organizations relevant during an election campaign, i.e. political parties and important gatekeepers, along with their respective Twitter and Facebook accounts.

(3) A list of tweet IDs which can be used to retrieve the tweets we collected during our research period.