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I thought the article was a great overview of the topics of social media data gathering. There are tons of benefits including ease of collection and lack of the Hawthorne effect where people in studies change their behavior merely on the fact that they’re being watched. These benefits make social media data extremely easy to gather and smart knowing that the data is genuine. However, there is also some drawbacks including biased data because of the relative similarity between social media users, these similarities even draw closer depending on which network the data is being gathered from. Facebook users will be much older than snapchat users and there will be many more women on pinterest and men on reddit. Depending on the type of population you are trying to gather data from, this can be a good or bad thing for an analyst.

I think social media is a great way to gather data from a wide range of subjects. Obviously it depends on the type of data you are gathering and the type of people you wish to gather data from, but the ease of collection and genuine answers make social media a great place to capture data for any purpose. Classmate HC agrees that “This gives a newfound accuracy to the data we collect through this medium.” There is a massive amount of accurate data around now that we would have never had access to before social media.