Yeah, no shit
How are you doing it? Content scraping and sentiment analysis?
How do you control for bots/malicious actors?
There are standard tools available for this, I am using Brandwatch. I have excluded some known bots, but those are basically automods on Reddit.
We do control for other kinds of bot activity, for example we know bots post promos and deals on Twitter and Reddit for affiliate marketing reasons, and we exclude them using hashtags known to be used for this. But other than that if you are referring to misinformation bots, in my experience that is a much smaller problem. I had run an analysis on r/conservative subreddit when the Yandex data center news broke and it did not not have visible impact on posting activity on that sub.
That’s interesting.
I worked on this same type of thing with professors at my university in 2020 and the issues we had was the data was becoming useless, as it was so easy to manipulate.
This is very popular in the corporate and content creator world. We use it to identify industry trends, and for consumer behaviour research.
This can inform what kind of content is published online, which are the trending topics, which influencers to collaborate with, what claims and product changes need to be made, etc etc.
If you spend enough time, you can get some really good insights. There are agencies whose sole job is this kind of work.
Neat. Are you a sociologist, or working with sociologists or a more data arm type of professionals?
I work in consumer insights for a global CPG company. Social listening is just one type of consumer research we do.
Neat.
Reddit can use this kind of data to predict what you may like or what your interests may be. They obviously like Meta have very sophisticated targeting algorithms, but here is a simplified example: Find Similar Subreddits — Audience Overlap Graph Tool | Anvaka
Needs more context.
If this is about the US, elections generate uncertainty, because people aren’t certain about what economic policy will be pursued until after the elections.
It’s global data, but US audiences as well as events drive the conversations.
Breakdown by countries. USA is ~10M. in total 23M conversations have geography data attached, out of ~53M total mentions for the same period.
Where is this? Global?
Yes global English language data
But there is a key difference, Recessionary fears were higher in April '25 but right now Inflation is a much bigger issue.
