Social Media Analysis

The field examines how people communicate and organize online, using text, images, video, user activity, and interaction networks. Common approaches include sentiment and stance classification, topic modeling, graph analysis, multimodal machine learning, and large language models. Researchers apply these methods to questions such as misinformation spread, political polarization, mental health, moderation, and audience engagement across platforms and events. A central challenge is ensuring that labels and models capture context, language, and platform differences well enough to support reliable conclusions about people and society.