The 2016 U.S. presidential election has been very influential for the Social Feed Manager project. First, it provided a ready supply of short-term (think, the debates) and long-term (think, the entire election season) events for testing collecting with SFM. Second, it provided the SFM team the opportunity to build a collection of social media data that is potentially valuable to researchers. While not political scientists or historians, the intuition of the SFM team has been that writing the history of the 2016 U.S. presidential election will require the relevant social media data.
It is in this spirit that the SFM team is sharing the tweet id of every single tweet that we collected around the election – all 280 million of them. The tweets are broken up into 12 collections:
- Candidates and key election hashtags (Twitter filter)
- Democratic candidates (Twitter user timeline)
- Democratic Convention (Twitter filter)
- Democratic Party (Twitter user timeline)
- Election Day (Twitter filter)
- First presidential debate (Twitter filter)
- GOP Convention (Twitter filter)
- Republican candidates (Twitter user timeline)
- Republican Party (Twitter user timeline)
- Second presidential debate (Twitter filter)
- Third presidential debate (Twitter filter)
- Vice Presidential debate (Twitter filter)
This dataset is available from Harvard Dataverse at doi:10.7910/DVN/PDI7IN. More complete documentation is included with the dataset.
For questions about the dataset, contact us. George Washington University researchers are encouraged to contact us directly for access to the tweets.