Computational Social Science and Microblogs The good, the bad and the ugly

According to the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas (CSSSA), computational social science is “The science that investigates social phenomena through the medium of computing and related advanced information processing technologies”. Positioned between the computer and so-cial sciences, this new and emerging interdisciplinary field is fuelled by at least the following two developments: (i) availability of data: With the web, a huge volume of social data is now available which enables the study of traces of social interactions on new scales. (ii) increasing quantifica-tion of social theories: With recent advances in the social sciences, social theories become increasingly formal and/or mathematical and thus amenable to quantification. Taken together, these two developments give rise to a whole rang