Are we seeing what they want us to see? Toward a synthetic aperture for social media methods

Abstract

Computational methods have offered new vantage points for understanding how meaning circulates during events and crises. These methods are not neutral and have conceptual challenges that must be addressed. This study makes five iterative passes through a data set of tweets during the Texas Blackout Crisis of 2021 showing that each method, applied in a reasonably professional way, would produce a different understanding of the crisis with different key actors, narratives, and dramatic entailments. The study concludes that a synthetic aperture model where multiple methods are applied to the same data offers practitioners and researchers better information, and at the very least that scanning methods must be justified to avoid manipulation.