The Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) is a collaboration between Demos and the Text Analytics Group at the University of Sussex. It produces new political, social and policy insight and understanding through social media research.

Social media is the largest, richest, and most dynamic evidence base for human behaviour, and brings new opportunities to understand groups, movements and society. Social media analytics – the automated collection and analysis of millions of people talking and arguing with one another – has already revolutionised marketing and advertising.

It could revolutionise policy and social research work too. However, as it stands, the current field of social media analytics is inadequate for policy makers: standards of evidence and methodological rigour are not high enough to influence decision or policy-making. Samples of convenience often produce ‘raw’ metrics with no further corroboration, explanation or interpretation. Considerations of culture, context, group, language and psychology are rare, and the ethics of social media research even rarer.

CASM, in collaboration with a wide network of experts and leaders in the field, combines computer science with social science in order to develop social media analysis as a valid instrument of research that meets the needs of policy and decision-makers: ethical, reliable, and useable.

 

Research Areas

CASM is currently working on the following project areas:

• Tipping points and thresholds: why do social events happen? From demonstrations to purchasing, a series of permissive conditions and causal factors drive the events around us. This project seeks to learn how social media research can identify the thresholds and tipping points – the difference between an event happening and not happening – of social events.

• Early detection of emerging events: reporting from citizen journalists on platforms like Twitter often pre-empts mainstream news. This project aims to construct a system that can cut through millions of irrelevant tweets to quickly identify emerging events as they happen.

• Online and offline groups and movements: digital social spaces are increasingly important venues for established, offline groups and new online-only ones. Social media research can reveal what they care about, what they are talking about, the group’s composition, how they interact with other groups and how this changes over time.

• Public responses to announcements, speeches and events: polls and surveys that rely on asking explicit questions suffer a number of biases. This project aims to understand, in real-time, how online populations react to external stimuli, and how this can inform our understanding of the offline groups from which they are drawn.

• Community-level behaviour: this work combines social media research with highly specific qualitative social research to produce insight into particular communities that is valid and sensitive to culture, language and identity.

• Social media polling of hard to reach groups: this technique provides novel ways of directly surveying difficult to reach groups, from all over the world. Recruiting survey participants from specified groups through social media, Jamie Bartlett ran a survey in 2011 of 13,000 supporters of far right parties in 12 European countries, published as The New Face of Digital Populism. The Centre is a leader in the methods and techniques of this type of polling and will shortly be releasing papers containing data from the first ever social media polls of supporters of the German Pirate Party and the Syriza Party in Greece.

• Ethics and law in social media collection and analysis: existing guidelines for research ethics can’t always be applied to social media research. We advise on how to conduct social media research according to strict ethical principles that respect the rights of those being researched.

All our outputs are:

• Reliable: for research to be useful, it needs to be reliable. We will employ and innovate social science techniques to improve the reliability of our work and always be transparent about the limits and weaknesses of any inferences and conclusions drawn.

• Usable: we will ensure that all our outputs deal with important problems and can be used to inform ways of confronting them. They will make sense to decision-makers, finding the meaning rather than just the metrics in social media. Everything will be simple and without jargon.

• Ethical: we believe that all social media research should be conducted according to strict principles that respect the rights of those being researched. We are leaders in the development of good ethical research methods for this new environment.

We shortly have research papers being released about online hate speech; the police and Twitter; and new polling of supporters of left-wing populist movements in Europe.

CASM EXPOSURE

Evidence submission: A Joint Committee of MPs and Lords was convened by the Home Secretary to provide scrutiny on the Draft Communications Bill in the face of wide public concern and criticism by civic society groups.

Jamie Bartlett, Demos' Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media appeared before the Committee on the 17th of October and this is the written submission he and Carl Miller were thereafter asked to provide. It argues for public attitudes to be put at the heart of a system that manages and mitigates the possible harms to privacy entailed by the access of communications data.

Hate speech conference: Carl Miller gave a presentation in Budapest as part of the Council of Europe's 'Tackling hate speech: Living together online' conference. Read the full text of the presentation on research perspective here and watch a video featuring Carl on the topic of online hate speech here.

The team structure

The team consists of a core staff of five, responsible for the delivery of most products. The team is highly experienced and widely published in social media research techniques and policy-making. The Centre also collaborates with a wider network of experts and organisations that advise on various aspects of the work, and provide additional research support where necessary.

 

Core staff

Jamie Bartlett is Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media.

 

 

 

Jamie is also the Head of the Violence and Extremism Programme at Demos. An expert on research methodology, Jamie is the author of more than 20 Demos pamphlets. He advises a number of international government agencies and related groups in relation to terrorism and extremism, and is a frequent commentator in national and international media. Contact Jamie to find out more about the Centre.

 

Carl Miller is Research Director of the Centre.

 

 

 

He specialises in the use of social media research to learn about people, ideas, groups and society. He is the co-author of the Demos publications #Intelligence (2012), Truth, Lies and the Internet (2011), The Power of Unreason (2010), and papers for academic journals, the European Commission and the United Nations.

 

Dr Jeremy Reffin is co-founder of the Text Analytics Group at the University of Sussex.

 

 

 

Jeremy is Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, with a background in computer programming, venture capital, and private equity investment.

 

Dr David Weir is co-founder of the Text Analytics Group at the University of Sussex.

 

 

 

David is Reader in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, at the University of Sussex. His research activities cover all aspects of the automatic analysis of text by computers, including distributional semantics (modelling semantic composition and sentiment-sensitive distributional thesaurus use) and linguistic parsing.

 

Simon Wibberley is an Associate.

 

 

 

Simon Wibberley is a Researcher at the Text Analytics Group. Simon's research interests are in statistical text analytics and he specialises in real-time text stream analysis, event detection, and entity recognition. Current projects include developing state of the art event detection and event characterisation techniques for use on Twitter.

 

Andrew Robertson is a researcher in the Text Analytics Group.

 

 

Andrew Robertson is a researcher in the Text Analytics Group. His research interests lie in extracting and utilising deeper structure from text sources such as Twitter, specialising in dependency parsing, entity linking and relation extraction. Current projects include adapting dependency parsing to deal with the noisy text of tweets, and developing techniques for utilising such structural information in complex sentiment analysis.

Network of experts

 

 

 

 

Angus Bankes founded and was CTO of Moreover Technologies, a business intelligence and news aggregation service, and pioneer of XML and RSS feeds. Angus currently heads up the incubator JustAddRed and is Chief Information Officer at Skimlinks.

 

 

 

 

Vicky Beeching is a Theologian and Ethicist specialising in the ethics of social media, and the intersection between technology and religion. She holds degrees from Oxford and is a Visiting Research Fellow in Internet Ethics at Durham University.

 

 

 

 

Dr Jeremy Crump is a director for safety and security at Cisco Systems and a visiting senior research fellow at the Leeds University Business School. Jeremy was previously a senior civil servant in the Cabinet Office and the Home Office and director of strategy for the National Policing Improvement Agency.

 

 

 

 

Charlie Edwards is Director of National Security and Resilience Studies at the Royal United Services Institute. Prior to RUSI he was a Research Leader at the RAND Corporation focusing on Defence and Security and was previously a former Deputy Director for Strategy and Planning in the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism at the Home Office.

 

 

 

 

Jennifer Evans is Associate Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She currently heads up a Social Science Humanities Research Council of Canada collaborative research project entitled 'Hate 2.0: Combating the Far Right in the Age of Social Technology'.

 

 

 

 

Catherine Fieschi is the director of Counterpoint, a research and advisory group that focuses on the cultural dynamics of risk. She holds a PhD in Comparative Political Science from McGill University, is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Government at the LSE and is the author of In the Shadow of Democracy (MUP) and of numerous publications on extremism, populism and identity politics.

 

 

 

 

Christian Gladwell is Director of Human Digital, the social media analysis company, and an expert in the use of social media for policy making.

 

 

 

 

Professor Chris Hankin is a Professor of Computing Science at Imperial College London and is Director of the Institute for Security Science. He is an advisor to the EU Director General for Information, Society and Media and President of the Scientific Council of INRIA.

 

 

 

 

Professor Noreena Hertz is an economist, best-selling author and campaigner. She is currently working on a forthcoming book about decision making in a complex world. She is chair of Vox Quorum, a social media analysis company.

 

 

 

 

Sebastian Kraus is vice-chairman of Asylos, an international network providing case-tailored research for lawyers representing asylum-seekers. He oversees the network's social media research.

 

 

 

 

Peter Kreko is Director of Political Capital, a policy research and consulting institute in Hungary, and assistant professor at Eötvös Loránd University. He is co-chair of the Preventing Violent Extremism working group of the EU Radicalisation Awareness Network.

 

 

 

 

Alberto Nardelli is the Co-founder and CEO of Tweetminster, a media utility that helps people and organisations discover the most relevant content, trends and insight around any topic, industry or market.

 

 

 

 

Professor Sir David Omand GCB is a visiting professor at King's College London. He is a former UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, Permanent Secretary of the Home Office and Director of GCHQ.

 

 

 

 

Fran O’Leary is a founder and Director of Lodestone Communications, a strategy and corporate communications consultancy.

 

 

 

 

Martin Orton is Founding Director of Bold Creative and of The Digital Disruption Project, and an expert in the benefits of digital innovation for social change.

 

 

 

 

Nick Pickles joined civil liberties and privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch as Director in September 2011, with a background in corporate public relations and technology.

 

 

 

 

Alfred Rolington is the CEO of Oxford Analytica and the former CEO of Jane’s Information Group and Chief Executive of Lloyds of London Press Business Publishing.

 

 

Philip Sheldrake is Managing Partner of Euler Partners, a social business consultancy. He is also the author of "The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age", a main board director of Intellect, and special advisor to AMEC on the measurement of social media. He leads the measurement and evaluation group at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

 

 

Milo Yiannopoulis is founder and Editor-in Chief of The Kernel. He was previously Consulting Editor (Technology) for Telegraph.co.uk and a European contributing editor at TechCrunch. In 2011 and again in 2012, Milo was named one of the 100 most influential people in Britain’s digital economy by WIRED magazine.

 

opportunities

The Centre is currently recruiting for interns. We welcome applicants with a background in natural language processing, machine learning, sentiment analysis, social research ethics and statistics.

Please contact Jamie on the details below to find out more.

 

Contact

If you would like to know more about the Centre, or explore options for working together, please contact Jamie Bartlett:

jamie.bartlett@demos.co.uk