Secure Data Solutions for Social Media Data Analysis

Social media are used by more and more people. It influences how people communicate, how they gather information and how they behave – not only on social media platforms but in general.For example, WeChat is used by 700 million people in China. Additional services such as payment systems, language training etc. are incorporated into this app, resulting in a huge source of personal information. It is likely that such repositories will be one future of data collections.Research in the social sciences must be enabled to analyse social media data to understand how societies in general are changing and developing. This personal data should not only be used by commercial companies. The social sciences therefore need to build methods and infrastructures to access social media data sources and to support analyses. For several reasons (e.g. privacy concerns, proprietary data) existing secure data solutions seem to be particularly interesting to facilitate social media data access and sharing. Secure access solutions would also ensure proper documentation and quality of the data and the reproducibility of results. The talk will present first approaches to adapt and develop the Secure Data Center at GESIS also as a platform for social media data analysis