Methodological Solutions for the Challenges of Studying Racist Communication on Social Media
Rachel Marks, Mel Stanfill · 2023
In considering how communication technologies are designed and used, it is essential to understand the roles of design, platform governance, and usage norms in amplifying harmful content. We sought to collect high-engagement racist posts from Reddit and Twitter, starting with search terms drawn from scholarly and activist sources, but discovered that hate groups’ tactics were evolving. When platforms suppress particular terms or hashtags, users must adjust their strategy with workarounds, which requires researchers to also adapt. We identify key failure points, false negatives and false positives, that plague researchers, offering suggestions for how to mitigate them. Then, we discuss the flexible methods we developed to address these challenges: recursive searching (mining results for more keywords), actor-based sampling (traversing profiles that posted racist material), and using algorithmically-recommended content. Our nimble research methods demonstrate how researchers can better gain insight into how the design of communication on platforms contributes to harmful uses.