At the other end of the spectrum are those who consider social media data as
akin to “administrative data.” Administrative data are generally deﬁned in the
research community as data that are produced for one reason (e.g., giving
students grades in a class to illustrate their competency in a subject area) but
can be analyzed for another purpose (e.g., to discern the most efﬁcient way to
spend tax dollars on education). Political scientists have long analyzed
administrative data at both the aggregate level (e.g., election results, protest
participation, unemployment rates) and the micro level (e.g., voter registration
data, census data) without assuming that the analysis of such data requires
individuals to have consented to be considered as subjects in a research study.
For administrative data, therefore, it is unnecessary for those individuals to
provide explicit consent in order for the data to be analyzed. Requiring explicit
Social_Media_and_Democracy