An Application of Content Analysis to Crowdtangle Data: The 2020 Constitutional Referendum Campaign on Facebook

This work has born with a specific methodological interest towards the new boundaries in accessing to online social data (Giglietto, Rossi 2015) in the era of platform society (Van Djick et al. 2018) with particular attention to the new phenomena of political communication (Felaco et al. 2019). The attempt was to test a new social data access tool made available by an online platform (in this specific case: Facebook’s CrowdTangle) and to deepen the epistemological issues the methodological implications of their use in social research. The limits and strengths of this access-to-data tool will be highlighted using a content analysis exercise applied to the analysis of the communication of political actor on Facebook during the 2020 constitutional referendum campaign. This research work was completed with the axial recoding of the collected material with the aim to verifying specific research hypotheses formulated in view of social and political sciences literature combined with the application of a multidimensional automatic analysis that can offer the reader a possible application to data extracted from CrowdTangle. This specific cognitive model was developed with the aim of overcoming ambiguities, limitations, and characterizations, which make the data coming from this platform unsuitable to be reused for secondary analysis purposes in social research, especially in the field of political communication. The reflections will try to combine the attention about analysis, the communication of political actors on Facebook during the 2020 constitutional referendum campaign, with the methodological reflection on the implications of the use of proprietary platforms that act on the data as an interface between the social media and the producers of knowledge. This article opens with a large introductory paragraph on the issues related to making social research with online platforms and the solution offered by Facebook with the CrowdTangle tool. In the second paragraph the case under study will be framed and questions and research hypotheses will be formulated. The third and fourth paragraphs will be dedicated to the construction of the empirical documentation and the analytical model and to the analysis of the dataset. Finally, the concluding paragraph will illustrate the main lessons learned about the use of this tool in social research.