From Dashboard to Data Acquisition

Brandon Silverman is a contributor to a report examining social media monitoring (SMM) companies' practices, finding that data sourcing for SMMs is often opaque and inconsistent. "Commercial interests are well-served in this environment, but public-interest researchers face shrinking access and growing disadvantage, precisely when rigorous, transparent research is most needed."

The complete report is available from GWU's Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics.

Silverman spoke at BKC last spring, urging social media companies to adopt responsible public interest scraping policies as scale.