Dataset for "What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?"

This dataset was used for this project: "What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?". Savvas Zannettou, Barry Bradlyn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, Haewoon Kwak, Jeremy Blackburn. Workshop on Computational Methods in CyberSafety, Online Harassment and Misinformation, 2018. DOI: 10.1145/3184558.3191531. In addition, this project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie ENCASE project (Grant Agreement No. 691025). The work reflects only the authors’ views; the Agency and the Commission are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. Using Gab’s API, we crawl the social network using a snowball methodology. Specifically, we obtain data for the most popular users as returned by Gab’s API and iteratively collect data from all their followers as well as their followings. Subsequently, for all users in our dataset we collect all of their the posts. Overall, we collect 22,112,812 posts from 336,752 users, between August 2016 and January 2018. This dataset is a .json file and each line has one .json object.本数据集用于以下研究项目：《Gab是什么？言论自由的堡垒还是另类右翼的回音室？》。作者为Savvas Zannettou、Barry Bradlyn、Emiliano De Cristofaro、Michael Sirivianos、Gianluca Stringhini、Haewoon Kwak、Jeremy Blackburn，发表于2018年网络安全、在线骚扰与错误信息计算方法研讨会（线上举办）。DOI编号：10.1145/3184558.3191531。 此外，本项目获欧盟地平线2020研究与创新计划下的玛丽·居里（Marie Skłodowska-Curie）ENCASE项目资助（资助协议编号：691025）。本研究仅代表作者个人观点，欧盟相关机构与欧盟委员会不对本数据集所含信息的任何使用行为负责。 本研究通过Gab平台的应用程序编程接口（Application Programming Interface，API），采用滚雪球抽样法爬取该社交网络数据。具体流程为：首先获取Gab API返回的热门用户数据集，随后迭代采集这些用户的全部粉丝与关注对象的相关数据；之后，针对数据集中的所有用户采集其发布的所有帖子。最终，我们在2016年8月至2018年1月期间，共从336752名用户处采集到22112812条帖子。 本数据集为JSON格式文件，每行包含一个JSON对象。