About
The Social Media Observatory (SMO) is a research and data infrastructure of the Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC/FGZ) dedicated to the systematic monitoring of public discourses in social media. Its purpose is to help us understanding how debates on platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram or Telegram shape everyday life, politics and social cohesion in Germany. Since 2020, the SMO has been developed as part of the and is based at the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg.
What does the SMO do?
At its core, the SMO continuously observes public communication in social media and online news. For this, it focuses on public speakers and public posts that are visible to everyone – for example:
- members of parliaments and political parties
- news organisations and journalists
- NGOs, movements and other public actors
- platform users commenting on public speaker posts or topics of interest.
The team compiles carefully checked lists of public speaker accounts (see our “database of public speakers”) and tracks how actively they post, which topics they talk about and how users react (e.g. likes, shares, comments).
In addition, the SMO builds thematic datasets for important public debates such as elections, the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine or conflicts around climate and energy policy. By following relevant keywords and hashtags, the SMO can reconstruct how a debate unfolds over time, which arguments become prominent and how strongly people polarise.
Where possible, social media data is compared with coverage from established news media. This helps answer questions such as: Do politicians and media talk about the same issues? Which actors set the tone on social platforms? And how do online debates relate to social cohesion in Germany?
How is the data used and protected?
Working with digital trace data raises sensitive ethical and legal questions. The SMO therefore follows strict rules:
- It collects only public content that users have made visible to everyone.
- It follows European and German data protection law (GDPR, BDSG)
- It tries to minimize risks for individuals and vulnerable groups, for example by aggregating results and avoiding unnecessary identification of single people.
Whenever possible, results are published in aggregated form, for example as charts in interactive dashboards that show long-term trends in posting behaviour, engagement or topic popularity. Raw data is not put online openly and shared with other researchers upon request only.
A “do-it-yourself” infrastructure for others
The SMO is more than a data collection and analysis project. We design it as a DIY research infrastructure:
- Our publicly accessible SMO wiki documents tools, methods, platform accesses and step-by-step guides for social media research to support researchers across their process, from formulating research questions to building samples and analyzing data.
- Open-source software developed in the SMO closes gaps in existing tool ecosystems, for example for collecting data from curated account lists or reconstructing discussion threads.
- Curated datasets, such as our collection of public speakers, are maintained and updated so that other teams do not have to start from scratch each time.
In this way, the SMO lowers the entry barrier for universities, research institutes and civil-society projects that want to analyze social media themselves but may not have the resources to build a full infrastructure.
Why is this important for society?
Social media can connect people, but it can also amplify conflicts, spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Research Institute Social Cohesion (FGZ) brings together researchers from eleven locations in Germany to study exactly these questions. The SMO is the FGZ’s specialized focus on digital communication. By providing long-term monitoring, reusable data and transparent methods, the SMO helps to recognise early when certain topics or groups dominate public debates and provides robust evidence for journalism, education, civil-society initiatives and policymaking.
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Our Mission
We will help researchers interested in (social) media data by enabling their data scraping, mining, and analysis potential and by clarifying the legal and ethical boundaries for this kind of research.
We are an open project from the beginning and invite everyone interested to contribute.
Our Goals
The aim of this project is to establish a “(Social) Media Observatory” (SMO). It will fulfil five essential tasks within and beyond the context of the Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC):
1. Infrastructure:
the design and implementation of a technical infrastructure consisting of cloud-based virtual servers and containers for self-deployment, a comprehensive database of social actors and organisations (due to its roots in the RISC, for the beginning in a German context), as well as specially developed open source scripts and freely accessible software packages, which will be used throughout the project period for a) continuous and actor-related and b) event- and case-related systematic observation of the media-based public;
2. Documentation:
the creation and maintenance of an English-language “handbook”, which refers in the form of a wiki to existing data sets, tools, software packages or similar in the field of “(social) media observation”;
3. Training:
the development of a training programme with regular biannual workshops for the collection and analysis of social media data;
4. Consulting:
the establishment of a contact and advice centre which supports the consortium partners in the pre-processing, analysis and evaluation of (social) media data in relation to projects as required, for example by means of consultation hours scheduled and project-based on demand;
5. Archiving:
the cooperation with external institutional partners (GESIS, Social Science One) to ensure the FAIR, secure, reliable, and long-term archiving of the (social) media data obtained within and beyond RISC and thus to develop their potential for further use.
Thus, while covering a wide field, the project does not pursue its own content-related question, but has the task of providing data, tools, knowledge, and competences to all interested projects within and beyond RISC in order to be able to independently work on questions related to media-based publicity.
Contact
Stay tuned, ask us anything, raise an issue, or contribute to our wiki!