As social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become ingrained in political and popular culture, a new Pew Research Center analysis of every tweet and Facebook post from members of Congress since 2015 finds that the congressional social media landscape has undergone vast changes in recent years. These shifts have been especially pronounced on Twitter. Compared with a similar time period in 2016, the typical member of Congress now tweets nearly twice as often (81% more), has nearly three times as many followers and receives more than six times as many retweets on their average post.

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Over the past five years, Pew Research Center’s Data Labs team has worked hard to steadily advance the Center’s data science capabilities. From text analysis to computer vision, we’ve applied a variety of computational methods to study important social issues in new ways and expand the scope of what’s possible for the Center. In doing so, we’ve written a lot of code.

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In this explainer, learn about the concept of machine learning and how Pew Research Center can use it to collect and analyze large pools of data.

Full post: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/04/what-is-machine-learning-and-how-does-it-work/

 

Most Americans are at least somewhat happy with their lives, but some have grappled with issues like loneliness and isolation, work-life balance and finding meaning and purpose. Over the years, Pew Research Center has conducted surveys in all these areas. Here are nine things we’ve learned from them about how Americans are coping with modern life: Read more

Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/35s0M1acFgadAo

Using a combination of public opinion surveys and large-scale data analysis, Pew Research Center has studied YouTube in recent years to better understand the content that gets posted to the site and how the U.S. public engages with it. Here are 10 key takeaways from our research.  Read more

Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/xWl6994Ph1N4VF

Podcast: https://techpolicypodcast.org/kids-and-youtube-with-patrick-van-kessel-ep-197/

An analysis of every video posted by high-subscriber channels in the first week of 2019 finds that children’s content – as well as content featuring children – received more views than other videos.  Read more

Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/NaZYO82hWSxTvV