Digital Trace
Many Canadians fear that polarization, disinformation, and foreign interference are all on the rise. But are they? To be able to make broad claims about Canada’s political discourse, Canadians require a panoramic overview of that discourse. The goal of the digital trace team is to provide that panorama.
MEO’s digital trace team continuously collects and archives news and Canadian political content on social media.
What we are hoping to achieve?
How do we do it?
We do this by continuously tracking political elites and influencers on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, and other apps frequented by Canadians. We centralize and standardize these data, then render them accessible to Canadian media researchers across the CDMRN and contribute to monthly public reports charting the evolution of our national discourse.
Lorenz curves showing severe inequality of voice among Canadian content producers on YouTube and TikTok. Source: page 28, State of the Canadian Media Ecosystem, November 2023
What do we track?
Tracking every Canadian who posts about politics is neither feasible nor ethical. Instead, we carefully curate seed lists of a few thousand Canadian politicians, news outlets, journalists, civil society organizations, influencers, and other public figures, who together set the agenda and shape our national political outlook. For more information about or to request access to our dataset, contact us at info@cdmrn.ca.
How do we support information incidents?
By continuously tracking Canadian political elites across multiple social media apps, we contribute measures on the Canadian information ecosystem to monthly situation reports that act as a regular update for Canadians on the evolving state of the national conversation, vulnerability and information threats. Our data render a motion picture of the ebb and flow of conversation on various topics, and the shifting networks of interactions among Canada’s political class.
The team behind the digital trace
The digital trace team consists of a mix of data engineers, data scientists, computer scientists, and social scientists with backgrounds in academia and industry, French and English language skills, and a passion for the Canadian context. The team lead, Alexei Abrahams, holds a doctorate in economics and is writing a book on how to develop social media observatories in Python. Zeynep Pehlivan, senior researcher and data engineer, holds a PhD in computer science and specializes in web archiving and applying machine learning methods to media data. Saewon Park, senior data analyst, holds a masters in political science, and is passionate about data stewardship and privacy. Mika Desblancs, data engineer, holds a masters in cognitive science and pours his creativity into web scraping and machine learning applications (bio’s team members can be found here).