Social media are utilized by millions of citizens to discuss important political issues. Politicians use these platforms to connect with the public and broadcast policy positions. Therefore, data from social media has enabled many studies of political discussion. While most analyses are limited to data from individual platforms, people are embedded in a larger information ecosystem spanning multiple social networks. Here we describe and provide access to the Indiana University 2022 U.S. Midterms Multi-Platform Social Media Dataset (MEIU22), a collection of social media posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and 4chan. MEIU22 links to posts about the midterm elections based on a comprehensive list of keywords and tracks the social media accounts of 1,011 candidates from October 1 to December 25, 2022. We also publish the source code of our pipeline to enable similar multi-platform research projects.
@article{arxiv.2301.06287,
title = {A Multi-Platform Collection of Social Media Posts about the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections},
author = {Rachith Aiyappa and Matthew R. DeVerna and Manita Pote and Bao Tran Truong and Wanying Zhao and David Axelrod and Aria Pessianzadeh and Zoher Kachwala and Munjung Kim and Ozgur Can Seckin and Minsuk Kim and Sunny Gandhi and Amrutha Manikonda and Francesco Pierri and Filippo Menczer and Kai-Cheng Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.06287},
year = {2025}
}