Author: Dr. Sebastian Stier

Sebastian Stier is a senior researcher in the Department of Computational Social Science at GESIS in Cologne with a research focus on political communication, comparative politics and the use of computational methods in the social sciences.

The German Federal Election 2021 Twitter Dataset

The German Federal Election of 2021 will be the most digitalized ever: In times of Covid-19, a younger electorate and omnipresence of user generated content, social media has become an important tool and arena for politics. While collecting data from Twitter’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is simple, it is difficult …

It’s not easy to spot disinformation on Twitter

Here’s what we learned from 8 political ‘astroturfing’ campaigns. Dr. Sebastian Stier and his co-authors Franziska Keller, David Schoch, and JungHwan Yang examine so called “astroturfing” campaigns which aim at misleading the public by giving a false impression that there is genuine grass-roots support or opposition for a particular group …