Five Important Social Media Trends in 2021

What are the five important social media trends that the research community needs to pay attention to in 2021?

1) New Regulatory and Legal Actions.

We’ve all heard the buzz about breaking up Facebook, and calls for more regulation of social media and online sales giants like Google and Amazon. There’s no doubt that in the United States, with a new Democratic presidential administration taking office in late January, that we’ll hear more about regulating social media platforms and generating a more competitive social media environment.

While I’m not thinking that there will be big changes in the regulatory environment for social media platforms in 2021, with lawsuits and scrutiny of their business practices, I think that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon might engage in some (needed) corporate self-reflection, and that they might themselves take some steps to alleviate some of the political pressure on their business models.

One change in 2021 might be that social media platforms, Facebook in particular, will be more open and transparent about their platforms, and that as part of that movement, will provide researchers with improved access to data from their platform (something that I wrote about recently in another Trustworthy Social Media post). Twitter will be taking a number of steps in 2021 to give academics and researchers improved access to data from their platform, and that also might put some pressure on the other social media and online commerce giants to do the same.

I also suspect that we will see more efforts to push the social media giants to better police the use of their platforms. For example, doing a better and more transparent job of detecting misinformation, eliminating trolling and harassment, and generally making the use of their platforms a positive and informative experience, may improve in 2021. Providing users and researchers with more information about how they are enforcing their policies might improve in 2021. Researchers will want to stay well-informed about these efforts, and about research that is being done to detect trolling, harassment, and misinformation online.

Finally, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the states take the lead in pushing for more regulation of social media platforms, in particular states (like California) that have the initiative and referendum process. Political science researchers have shown that strategic politicians use the initiative and referendum process to put issues like these in front of voters, and I would not be surprised if we hear discussion of potential ballot measures to further regulate social media platforms in 2021.

2) Increasing Use of Video Content.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. researcher to tell you that social media platforms are seeing more and more video content (and that they are giving their users improved tools to post and edit video content). While the research community has made great advances in the analysis of the text information generated by social media platforms, we still lag behind the user community in our tools for collecting, storing, and analyzing the vast amount of video content that is being shared today on social media platforms.

By not analyzing video social media content, the research community is really missing out on a lot of important information. A social media post might have a short snippet of text, with an accompanying video, where the text does not adequately describe the details of the content in the video. Or that text snippet might be phrased in a way that leads natural-language processing methods astray, and we actually don’t get the correct interpretation of the content because we ignore the video.

The good news is that researchers are actively working to develop tools and methods that allow for the quick and easy analysis of images and videos; an excellent introduction is in this book, Images as Data for Social Science Research (recently published in a book series that I co-edit). While our methods for analysis of video social media content are lagging the dissemination of video content, I am sure that in 2021 we will see an increased focus on the development of tools for analysis of video content by researchers. I also anticipate that we see an increase in the quantity of interesting research papers published in 2021 that use data from social media video content.

3) Now You See It, Now You Don’t.

One issue that might be troubling for researchers is the trend towards the increased use of so-called “ephemeral content.” This is social media content that is posted but which automatically disappears after some period of time, and it’s becoming increasingly popular (for example, Snapchat and Instagram).

In 2021, we will see social media platforms provide their users with more tools to post transitory content. And I suspect that we will also see that users will take advantage of these tools. These trends pose problems for many types of research that are conducted using social media data, especially those that collect or scrape social media posts days, weeks, or months after they were originally published.

If more ephemeral content is posted in 2021, researchers might increasingly be missing out on social media platform conversations. If users take advantage of these tools for posting content that quickly disappears, and use them for certain types of conversations, this might introduce different types of biases in social media datasets and analyses. Researchers will need to follow this trend carefully, and in some cases, rethink their data collection methods. And researchers might need to start to think about how to detect and correct for these types of biases in their analyses of datasets where some content might have been self-censored.

4) New Social Media Platforms?

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the other big social media platforms won’t disappear in 2021. But I think that we will continue to see new social media platforms emerge in 2021 (after all, I don’t think that anyone saw that TikTok would become so popular, and so controversial, in 2020!).

While new social media platforms won’t replace their bigger rivals in 2021, I think that we will see the continued emergence of new social media platforms in 2021. Researchers should pay careful attention to these new entrants, because like TikTok they will likely focus on trying to gain user shares quickly among very specific demographics, with very specific types of applications. If many members of specific demographic groups suddenly shift their social media from Facebook or Twitter to a new platform, that again produces potential biases in our data. In 2021 researchers pay more attention to these new social media platforms, like TikTok, which haven’t received a great deal of attention in the research literature.

5) New Tools for Analysis of Social Media Data.

Finally, I’m excited and confident that we will see many new tools and methods in 2021 for the analysis of social media. The research community has made great advances in the development of tools and methods for analyzing the text in social media data, and we will see the continuation of this in 2021. I think we will see text and natural language processing tools that will be faster and that will work with data at larger scales; our Trustworthy Social Media group is working on some new topic models methods in very large scale text datasets, for example.

Also, as I discussed earlier, there’s going to be a lot more development of tools for the collection and analysis of images and video. With so much social media content today including images and video, researchers will need to analyze those content alongside the accompanying text, which will complicate the computational tasks of working with social media data.

Finally, I hope that in 2021 we also see that researchers develop and release more tools for the collection of social media data. Our group has released the code for our cloud-based social media collection infrastructure, and I expect that we will see other research groups share similar code and tools in 2021.

Conclusion

In conclusion, 2021 is going to be a challenging and exciting time to be collecting and analyzing social media data. With so much of the world’s communications shifting to social media platforms, with the emergence of new social media tools, and with the shift towards video content, we will have a lot of work in 2021 to continue our research towards building more Trustworthy Social Media. I’m confident that 2021 is going to see a great deal of innovating and exciting research and scientific developments!