At the end of October 2022, Elon Musk concluded his acquisition of Twitter. In the weeks and months before that, several questions were publicly discussed that were not only of interest to the platform's future buyers, but also of high relevance to the Computational Social Science research community. For example, how many active users does the platform have? What percentage of accounts on the site are bots? And, what are the dominating topics and sub-topical spheres on the platform? In a globally coordinated effort of 80 scholars to shed light on these questions, and to offer a dataset that will equip other researchers to do the same, we have collected all 375 million tweets published within a 24-hour time period starting on September 21, 2022. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first complete 24-hour Twitter dataset that is available for the research community. With it, the present work aims to accomplish two goals. First, we seek to answer the aforementioned questions and provide descriptive metrics about Twitter that can serve as references for other researchers. Second, we create a baseline dataset for future research that can be used to study the potential impact of the platform's ownership change.
翻译:在2022年10月底,埃隆·马斯克完成了对Twitter的收购。在此之前的几个星期和几个月里,公开讨论了一些问题,这些问题不仅对于该平台未来的买家而言具有兴趣,而且对于计算社交科学研究社群也具有高度相关性。例如,该平台有多少活跃用户?在该网站上,有多少个账户是机器人?主导的话题和子话题领域是什么?在80位学者的全球协调努力下,我们收集了从2022年9月21日开始的24小时时间段内发布的全部3.75亿条推文。据我们所知,这是第一个可供研究社群使用的完整的24小时Twitter数据集。本文分两个目标。首先,我们旨在回答上述问题,并提供描述性指标,以供其他研究者参考。其次,我们创建了一个基准数据集,供未来的研究使用,用于研究该平台所有权变更的潜在影响。