Social Media

Overview

In the United States, it would be difficult to find an individual that doesn’t interact with at least one form of social media. While there are several different platforms, social media is defined as the “websites and applications which enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.”^[1]

Though you might not think to immediately turn to social media when doing research, there are some cases in which it can be useful. This chapter will discuss how social media might be used in academic research and how to engage social media with a critical eye.

Social Media as an Information Source

Social media can be a useful tool for getting various perspectives on events as they are occurring. In some cases, social media even plays an important role in how the event takes place and how we understand it afterward. One famous example is the use of social media during the Arab Spring anti-government uprisings and protests of the early 2010s. When local news reporters were being censored, social media allowed for those who participated in the protests to share their experiences with outside reporters. Social-media posts also became an important way for historians and social scientists to understand what occurred during the protests and how social media was used as an organizational tool.

‎”We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.” #egypt #jan25

— Fawaz Rashed (@FawazRashed) March 18, 2011

In your own research, you might use social media as a source in a similar way. Let’s say you are researching the cultural impact of the show Game of Thrones and you want to understand public perception of the series finale. Using social-media posts would be a great way to understand what audiences thought about the finale and demonstrate how that connects to its overall cultural impact. In this case, social media would be a primary source, which is an item or document that provides a first-hand account of an event or time period.

So this was very underwhelming. #gameofthrones pic.twitter.com/BpYmoloAXI

— Something like a Tyrant 🤠 (@TheASMLife) May 20, 2019

Posts from verified social-media accounts, such as those run by newspapers or journalists, can be a helpful and accessible way to engage with news content. For instance, a journalist or researcher might create a TikTok video summarizing their latest article, offering a quick and digestible overview of the key points without requiring you to read the full piece.

While you likely wouldn’t cite the TikTok summary of an article in an academic paper, it can serve as a useful starting point. From there, you can use a search engine like Google to track down the original source and evaluate it more thoroughly.

Now, let’s walk through an example of how to locate the original article based on a TikTok summary. Dr. Ryan Martin posted the following video about an article he wrote for HuffPost:

@angerprofessor

Working harder and more intentionally to address male anger. #greenscreen

♬ original sound – Ryan Martin

To find the original article, we can search for the title displayed in the video, or we can use search terms like “Ryan Martin Huffpost.” When we do that, we find the original article from January 2025, titled “I’ve Studied Anger for Decades. Then an Encounter with a Man After Trump Won Changed Everything.”

Blogs

You are probably familiar with other types of content that are created by users, such as blogs, YouTube videos, and podcasts. While we will cover videos and podcasts in our “Multimedia” chapter, let’s briefly discuss blogs.

A blog (short for weblog) is a space online where people write posts about various topics, depending on their interests. Blogs can range from purely opinion-based to research-based posts that rival some journal articles. Both individuals with little expertise and highly reputable groups can publish blogs. With such high variability in quality, evaluating the author or publisher is crucial (to find out how to evaluate a source, see our “Evaluating Sources” chapter).

Blog Characteristics

• Updated: Blogs are regularly updated. Some blogs are updated multiple times a day, whereas other blogs are updated weekly.
• Order of posts: Blog posts are shown in reverse chronological order, meaning that the most recent post is shown at the top of the webpage.
• Comments: Blogs have the capacity for people to comment on the posts; however, some blog authors turn off this function.

Engaging with a Critical Eye

Social media makes it easy to consume large amounts of information without much critical thought. Many platforms are designed to keep users engaged within their ecosystem, which can make it difficult to verify the information being shared or to conduct outside research.

For example, X (formerly Twitter) discourages users from linking to external sources by reducing the visibility of posts that include URLs. As a result, creators are often incentivized to omit source links in order to boost engagement. This design choice can unintentionally make it easier for misinformation to spread, as posts lacking context or citations are more likely to reach a wider audience. Other platforms, like TikTok and Instagram, make it difficult to attach links to posts within the caption. In our example above, Dr. Martin can’t put a link to the article directly in the caption of the video. If Dr. Martin provided a link on his profile, it would open within the TikTok platform and be pretty difficult to navigate, rather than opening in your default browser. This is why it’s important to move outside of the social-media platform to verify information.

We will cover evaluation methods in the “Evaluating Sources” chapter.

Attribution

This chapter contains material adapted from: Blogs & Forum Posts by Diana Wakimoto at California State University reuse with permission