What social media data should i use in my research?: a comparative analysis of Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and the New York Times comments

The emergence of popular social media allows people to generate and share information in unprecedented and multiple ways. While studies concerning social media data are plentiful and can be found across a variety of scholarly disciplines, there has been little research done that compares multiple social media while considering topics and goals of an investigation. We collected and analyzed comparable data from four different social media sources: Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and the New York Times website, across five research topics. We then analyzed these data sets across several criteria, such as richness and the diversity of information that they contain. Our analysis shows the trade-offs between different social media services and also provides a new framework to compare cross-platform data collection and analysis utility.