OSoMe researchers develop new dashboard to track midterm election information across social media

Misleading claims about elections create serious challenges for election officials, social media companies, journalists, and voters. The Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe) at Indiana University has launched a new dashboard focused on the 2022 US midterm elections.

The US Midterm Elections 2022 dashboard shows the most shared websites and the accounts disseminating this content across social media platforms. Currently the dashboard includes Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, with more platforms to be added later. The dashboard also shows the top hashtags and images from these platforms.

The dashboard uses a list of keywords related to the midterm elections such as “midterm election,” “voteblue,” and “vote republicans” to fetch posts from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It then extracts the links, hashtags, and images shared in these posts and counts their frequencies in the past one day, three days, and seven days. The links are further categorized as “high-” or “low-credibility” based on the rating of NewsGuard, and the accounts who posted the most shared articles are shown.

For additional information about OSoMe or their suite of public tools, please visit osome.iu.edu.