Chapter 13 presents a conclusion in which we discuss “The Challenges and
Opportunities for Social Media Research.” In particular, we stress the
importance of access to new forms of data for public-facing research and
note the new legal and ethical questions arising from research in this
domain. We have entered a new world for research on fundamental
questions of political communication and behavior. Although the amount of
data now available for research in these areas is unprecedented,
large
companies control access to most of the data that contain the answers to the
questions social scientists are now asking. How social scientists interact with
these companies, let alone whether to accept funding and exclusive data access
from them, has become a unique challenge for modern research. Moreover,
privacy concerns, especially in the wake of the notorious Cambridge Analytica
scandal, have led the major internet platforms to become increasingly
Social_Media_and_Democracy