Context

Worldwide Social Media User in 2021 (Quarterly)

Acknowledgements

Facebook: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ Twitter: https://investor.twitterinc.com/home/default.aspx Instagram: https://investor.fb.com/home/default.aspx

The number of Twitter users in the United States was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 4.3 million users (+5.32 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Twitter user base is estimated to reach 85.08 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Twitter users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here regarding the platform twitter, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).Find more key insights for the number of Twitter users in countries like Canada and Mexico.

1) Data Introduction • The Social Media Usage Dataset(Applications) features patterns and activity indicators that 1,000 users use seven major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

2) Data Utilization (1) Social Media Usage Dataset(Applications) has characteristics that: • This dataset provides different social media activity data for each user, including daily usage time, number of posts, number of likes received, and number of new followers. (2) Social Media Usage Dataset(Applications) can be used to: • Analysis of User Participation by Platform: You can analyze participation and popular trends by platform by comparing usage time and activity for each social media. • Establish marketing strategy: Based on user activity data, it can be used for targeted marketing, content production, and user retention strategies.

Which county has the most Facebook users?

              There are more than 378 million Facebook users in India alone, making it the leading country in terms of Facebook audience size. To put this into context, if India’s Facebook audience were a country then it would be ranked third in terms of largest population worldwide. Apart from India, there are several other markets with more than 100 million Facebook users each: The United States, Indonesia, and Brazil with 193.8 million, 119.05 million, and 112.55 million Facebook users respectively.

              Facebook – the most used social media

              Meta, the company that was previously called Facebook, owns four of the most popular social media platforms worldwide, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram. As of the third quarter of 2021, there were around 3,5 billion cumulative monthly users of the company’s products worldwide. With around 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social media worldwide. With an audience of this scale, it is no surprise that the vast majority of Facebook’s revenue is generated through advertising.

              Facebook usage by device
              As of July 2021, it was found that 98.5 percent of active users accessed their Facebook account from mobile devices. In fact, almost 81.8 percent of Facebook audiences worldwide access the platform only via mobile phone. Facebook is not only available through mobile browser as the company has published several mobile apps for users to access their products and services. As of the third quarter 2021, the four core Meta products were leading the ranking of most downloaded mobile apps worldwide, with WhatsApp amassing approximately six billion downloads.

Gain valuable insights with our comprehensive Social Media Dataset, designed to help businesses, marketers, and analysts track trends, monitor engagement, and optimize strategies. This dataset provides structured and reliable social media data from multiple platforms.

Dataset Features

User Profiles: Access public social media profiles, including usernames, bios, follower counts, engagement metrics, and more. Ideal for audience analysis, influencer marketing, and competitive research. Posts & Content: Extract posts, captions, hashtags, media (images/videos), timestamps, and engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments. Useful for trend analysis, sentiment tracking, and content strategy optimization. Comments & Interactions: Analyze user interactions, including replies, mentions, and discussions. This data helps brands understand audience sentiment and engagement patterns. Hashtag & Trend Tracking: Monitor trending hashtags, topics, and viral content across platforms to stay ahead of industry trends and consumer interests.

Customizable Subsets for Specific Needs Our Social Media Dataset is fully customizable, allowing you to filter data based on platform, region, keywords, engagement levels, or specific user profiles. Whether you need a broad dataset for market research or a focused subset for brand monitoring, we tailor the dataset to your needs.

Popular Use Cases

Brand Monitoring & Reputation Management: Track brand mentions, customer feedback, and sentiment analysis to manage online reputation effectively. Influencer Marketing & Audience Analysis: Identify key influencers, analyze engagement metrics, and optimize influencer partnerships. Competitive Intelligence: Monitor competitor activity, content performance, and audience engagement to refine marketing strategies. Market Research & Consumer Insights: Analyze social media trends, customer preferences, and emerging topics to inform business decisions. AI & Predictive Analytics: Leverage structured social media data for AI-driven trend forecasting, sentiment analysis, and automated content recommendations.

Whether you're tracking brand sentiment, analyzing audience engagement, or monitoring industry trends, our Social Media Dataset provides the structured data you need. Get started today and customize your dataset to fit your business objectives.

As of April 2024, it was found that men between the ages of 25 and 34 years made up Facebook largest audience, accounting for 18.4 percent of global users. Additionally, Facebook's second largest audience base could be found with men aged 18 to 24 years.

              Facebook connects the world

              Founded in 2004 and going public in 2012, Facebook is one of the biggest internet companies in the world with influence that goes beyond social media. It is widely considered as one of the Big Four tech companies, along with Google, Apple, and Amazon (all together known under the acronym GAFA). Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide and the company also owns three other billion-user properties: mobile messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger,
              as well as photo-sharing app Instagram. Facebook usersThe vast majority of Facebook users connect to the social network via mobile devices. This is unsurprising, as Facebook has many users in mobile-first online markets. Currently, India ranks first in terms of Facebook audience size with 378 million users. The United States, Brazil, and Indonesia also all have more than 100 million Facebook users each.

Full replication package for the paper.. Visit https://dataone.org/datasets/sha256%3Ab3d7aac1ffd3ecf0b3acdf85051e824b57004996214e962dea4f4b46ad275fa5 for complete metadata about this dataset.

Context: This dataset offers insights into the usage patterns of social media apps for 1,000 users across seven popular platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It tracks various metrics such as daily time spent on the app, number of posts made, likes received, and new followers gained.

Dataset Features:

User_ID: Unique identifier for each user. App: The social media platform being used. Daily_Minutes_Spent: Total time a user spends on the app each day, ranging from 5 to 500 minutes. Posts_Per_Day: Number of posts a user creates per day, ranging from 0 to 20. Likes_Per_Day: Total number of likes a user receives on their posts each day, ranging from 0 to 200. Follows_Per_Day: The number of new followers a user gains daily, ranging from 0 to 50. Context & Use Cases: This dataset could be particularly useful for social media analysts, digital marketers, or researchers interested in understanding user engagement trends across different platforms. It provides insights into how much time users spend, how actively they post, and the level of engagement they receive (in terms of likes and followers).

Conclusion & Outcome: Analyzing this dataset could yield several outcomes:

Engagement Patterns: Identifying which platforms have higher engagement in terms of time spent or likes received. Active Users: Determining which users are the most active across various platforms based on the number of posts and followers gained. User Retention: Studying the correlation between time spent and follower growth, providing insight into user retention strategies for different platforms. Overall, the dataset allows for exploration of social media usage trends and helps drive decision-making for marketing strategies, content creation, and platform engagement.

This dataset provides comprehensive social media profile links discovered through real-time web search. It includes profiles from major social networks like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, Github and more. The data is gathered through intelligent search algorithms and pattern matching. Users can leverage this dataset for social media research, influencer discovery, social presence analysis, and social media marketing. The API enables efficient discovery of social profiles across multiple platforms. The dataset is delivered in a JSON format via REST API.

As of April 2024, Facebook had an addressable ad audience reach 131.1 percent in Libya, followed by the United Arab Emirates with 120.5 percent and Mongolia with 116 percent. Additionally, the Philippines and Qatar had addressable ad audiences of 114.5 percent and 111.7 percent.

Cristiano Ronaldo has one of the most popular Instagram accounts as of April 2024.

              The Portuguese footballer is the most-followed person on the photo sharing app platform with 628 million followers. Instagram's own account was ranked first with roughly 672 million followers.

              How popular is Instagram?

              Instagram is a photo-sharing social networking service that enables users to take pictures and edit them with filters. The platform allows users to post and share their images online and directly with their friends and followers on the social network. The cross-platform app reached one billion monthly active users in mid-2018. In 2020, there were over 114 million Instagram users in the United States and experts project this figure to surpass 127 million users in 2023.

              Who uses Instagram?

              Instagram audiences are predominantly young – recent data states that almost 60 percent of U.S. Instagram users are aged 34 years or younger. Fall 2020 data reveals that Instagram is also one of the most popular social media for teens and one of the social networks with the biggest reach among teens in the United States.

              Celebrity influencers on Instagram
              Many celebrities and athletes are brand spokespeople and generate additional income with social media advertising and sponsored content. Unsurprisingly, Ronaldo ranked first again, as the average media value of one of his Instagram posts was 985,441 U.S. dollars.

About Dataset This dataset captures the pulse of viral social media trends across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It provides insights into the most popular hashtags, content types, and user engagement levels, offering a comprehensive view of how trends unfold across platforms. With regional data and influencer-driven content, this dataset is perfect for:

Trend analysis 🔍 Sentiment modeling 💭 Understanding influencer marketing 📈 Dive in to explore what makes content go viral, the behaviors that drive engagement, and how trends evolve on a global scale! 🌍

Author: Víctor Yeste. Universitat Politècnica de Valencia.The object of this study is the design of a cybermetric methodology whose objectives are to measure the success of the content published in online media and the possible prediction of the selected success variables.In this case, due to the need to integrate data from two separate areas, such as web publishing and the analysis of their shares and related topics on Twitter, has opted for programming as you access both the Google Analytics v4 reporting API and Twitter Standard API, always respecting the limits of these.The website analyzed is hellofriki.com. It is an online media whose primary intention is to solve the need for information on some topics that provide daily a vast number of news in the form of news, as well as the possibility of analysis, reports, interviews, and many other information formats. All these contents are under the scope of the sections of cinema, series, video games, literature, and comics.This dataset has contributed to the elaboration of the PhD Thesis:Yeste Moreno, VM. (2021). Diseño de una metodología cibermétrica de cálculo del éxito para la optimización de contenidos web [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/176009Data have been obtained from each last-minute news article published online according to the indicators described in the doctoral thesis. All related data are stored in a database, divided into the following tables:tesis_followers: User ID list of media account followers.tesis_hometimeline: data from tweets posted by the media account sharing breaking news from the web.status_id: Tweet IDcreated_at: date of publicationtext: content of the tweetpath: URL extracted after processing the shortened URL in textpost_shared: Article ID in WordPress that is being sharedretweet_count: number of retweetsfavorite_count: number of favoritestesis_hometimeline_other: data from tweets posted by the media account that do not share breaking news from the web. Other typologies, automatic Facebook shares, custom tweets without link to an article, etc. With the same fields as tesis_hometimeline.tesis_posts: data of articles published by the web and processed for some analysis.stats_id: Analysis IDpost_id: Article ID in WordPresspost_date: article publication date in WordPresspost_title: title of the articlepath: URL of the article in the middle webtags: Tags ID or WordPress tags related to the articleuniquepageviews: unique page viewsentrancerate: input ratioavgtimeonpage: average visit timeexitrate: output ratiopageviewspersession: page views per sessionadsense_adunitsviewed: number of ads viewed by usersadsense_viewableimpressionpercent: ad display ratioadsense_ctr: ad click ratioadsense_ecpm: estimated ad revenue per 1000 page viewstesis_stats: data from a particular analysis, performed at each published breaking news item. Fields with statistical values can be computed from the data in the other tables, but total and average calculations are saved for faster and easier further processing.id: ID of the analysisphase: phase of the thesis in which analysis has been carried out (right now all are 1)time: "0" if at the time of publication, "1" if 14 days laterstart_date: date and time of measurement on the day of publicationend_date: date and time when the measurement is made 14 days latermain_post_id: ID of the published article to be analysedmain_post_theme: Main section of the published article to analyzesuperheroes_theme: "1" if about superheroes, "0" if nottrailer_theme: "1" if trailer, "0" if notname: empty field, possibility to add a custom name manuallynotes: empty field, possibility to add personalized notes manually, as if some tag has been removed manually for being considered too generic, despite the fact that the editor put itnum_articles: number of articles analysednum_articles_with_traffic: number of articles analysed with traffic (which will be taken into account for traffic analysis)num_articles_with_tw_data: number of articles with data from when they were shared on the media’s Twitter accountnum_terms: number of terms analyzeduniquepageviews_total: total page viewsuniquepageviews_mean: average page viewsentrancerate_mean: average input ratioavgtimeonpage_mean: average duration of visitsexitrate_mean: average output ratiopageviewspersession_mean: average page views per sessiontotal: total of ads viewedadsense_adunitsviewed_mean: average of ads viewedadsense_viewableimpressionpercent_mean: average ad display ratioadsense_ctr_mean: average ad click ratioadsense_ecpm_mean: estimated ad revenue per 1000 page viewsTotal: total incomeretweet_count_mean: average incomefavorite_count_total: total of favoritesfavorite_count_mean: average of favoritesterms_ini_num_tweets: total tweets on the terms on the day of publicationterms_ini_retweet_count_total: total retweets on the terms on the day of publicationterms_ini_retweet_count_mean: average retweets on the terms on the day of publicationterms_ini_favorite_count_total: total of favorites on the terms on the day of publicationterms_ini_favorite_count_mean: average of favorites on the terms on the day of publicationterms_ini_followers_talking_rate: ratio of followers of the media Twitter account who have recently published a tweet talking about the terms on the day of publicationterms_ini_user_num_followers_mean: average followers of users who have spoken of the terms on the day of publicationterms_ini_user_num_tweets_mean: average number of tweets published by users who spoke about the terms on the day of publicationterms_ini_user_age_mean: average age in days of users who have spoken of the terms on the day of publicationterms_ini_ur_inclusion_rate: URL inclusion ratio of tweets talking about terms on the day of publicationterms_end_num_tweets: total tweets on terms 14 days after publicationterms_ini_retweet_count_total: total retweets on terms 14 days after publicationterms_ini_retweet_count_mean: average retweets on terms 14 days after publicationterms_ini_favorite_count_total: total bookmarks on terms 14 days after publicationterms_ini_favorite_count_mean: average of favorites on terms 14 days after publicationterms_ini_followers_talking_rate: ratio of media Twitter account followers who have recently posted a tweet talking about the terms 14 days after publicationterms_ini_user_num_followers_mean: average followers of users who have spoken of the terms 14 days after publicationterms_ini_user_num_tweets_mean: average number of tweets published by users who have spoken about the terms 14 days after publicationterms_ini_user_age_mean: the average age in days of users who have spoken of the terms 14 days after publicationterms_ini_ur_inclusion_rate: URL inclusion ratio of tweets talking about terms 14 days after publication.tesis_terms: data of the terms (tags) related to the processed articles.stats_id: Analysis IDtime: "0" if at the time of publication, "1" if 14 days laterterm_id: Term ID (tag) in WordPressname: Name of the termslug: URL of the termnum_tweets: number of tweetsretweet_count_total: total retweetsretweet_count_mean: average retweetsfavorite_count_total: total of favoritesfavorite_count_mean: average of favoritesfollowers_talking_rate: ratio of followers of the media Twitter account who have recently published a tweet talking about the termuser_num_followers_mean: average followers of users who were talking about the termuser_num_tweets_mean: average number of tweets published by users who were talking about the termuser_age_mean: average age in days of users who were talking about the termurl_inclusion_rate: URL inclusion ratio

The number of Twitter users in Indonesia was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 1.4 million users (+6.14 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Twitter user base is estimated to reach 24.25 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Twitter users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here regarding the platform twitter, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).Find more key insights for the number of Twitter users in countries like Malaysia and Singapore.

Social Media Monitoring of the German Federal Election Campaign 2017

This dataset contains results from the social media monitoring of Facebook and Twitter for the German federal election campaign 2017. The project collected the tweets and Facebook posts of political candidates and organizations and the engagement of users with these contents – retweets and @-mentions on Twitter, comments, shares and likes on Facebook. Finally, all messages on Twitter containing at least one keyword denoting central political topics were collected. All data was publicly available at the time of data collection. The collected data is proprietary and owned by Facebook and Twitter. Due to this and with respect to privacy restrictions, only the following aspects of the data can be shared:

(1) A list of all candidates that were considered in the project, their key attributes and the identification of their respective Twitter accounts and Facebook pages.

Candidate dataset: Full surname, all first names of the candidate; academic title and name pre- or suffixes (if they exist); URL of the first Facebook account; URL of the second Facebook account; URL of the Twitter account; candidate is placed on a party list; candidate’s place on the party list; candidate is a direct candidate in one of the constituencies; official number and official name of the constituency in which the candidate is running for a direct mandate; state; candidate is a member of the federal parliament (Bundestag); party of the candidate; sex, age (year of birth); place of residence; place of birth; profession.

Additionally coded was: unique ID.

(2) Lists of organizations relevant during an election campaign, i.e. political parties and important gatekeepers, along with their respective Twitter and Facebook accounts.

(3) A list of tweet IDs which can be used to retrieve the tweets we collected during our research period.

Data produced in Impact-of-social-media-on-suicide-rates .

Acknowledgements:

WHO data export (https://apps.who.int/gho/athena/api/GHO/SDGSUICIDE.csv) was used bound by the following poilcy: https://www.who.int/about/who-we-are/publishing-policies/data-policy

Kaggle dataset regarding social media usage was used (https://www.kaggle.com/margarethamartinez/socialmedia2021) with additional acknowledgements of the original sources necessary:

Acknowledgements:

Facebook: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/

Twitter: https://investor.twitterinc.com/home/default.aspx

Instagram: https://investor.fb.com/home/default.aspx

This dataset comprises 2,271 entries and provides insights into user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) preferences across various digital platforms. Key information includes user demographics (Name, Age, Gender) and platform preferences (e.g., Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Website). It captures user experiences and satisfaction levels with various UI/UX elements such as color schemes, visual hierarchy, typography, multimedia usage, and layout design. The dataset also includes evaluations of mobile responsiveness, call-to-action buttons, form usability, feedback/error messages, loading speed, personalization, accessibility, and interactions (like scrolling behavior and gestures). Each UI/UX component is rated on a scale, allowing for quantitative analysis of user preferences and experiences, making this dataset valuable for research in user-centered design and usability optimization.

As of April 2024, almost 32 percent of global Instagram audiences were aged between 18 and 24 years, and 30.6 percent of users were aged between 25 and 34 years. Overall, 16 percent of users belonged to the 35 to 44 year age group.

              Instagram users

              With roughly one billion monthly active users, Instagram belongs to the most popular social networks worldwide. The social photo sharing app is especially popular in India and in the United States, which have respectively 362.9 million and 169.7 million Instagram users each.

              Instagram features

              One of the most popular features of Instagram is Stories. Users can post photos and videos to their Stories stream and the content is live for others to view for 24 hours before it disappears. In January 2019, the company reported that there were 500 million daily active Instagram Stories users. Instagram Stories directly competes with Snapchat, another photo sharing app that initially became famous due to it’s “vanishing photos” feature.
              As of the second quarter of 2021, Snapchat had 293 million daily active users.

Overview
The Controllable Multimodal Feedback Synthesis (CMFeed) Dataset is designed to enable the generation of sentiment-controlled feedback from multimodal inputs, including text and images. This dataset can be used to train feedback synthesis models in both uncontrolled and sentiment-controlled manners. Serving a crucial role in advancing research, the CMFeed dataset supports the development of human-like feedback synthesis, a novel task defined by the dataset's authors. Additionally, the corresponding feedback synthesis models and benchmark results are presented in the associated code and research publication.

Task Uniqueness: The task of controllable multimodal feedback synthesis is unique, distinct from LLMs and tasks like VisDial, and not addressed by multi-modal LLMs. LLMs often exhibit errors and hallucinations, as evidenced by their auto-regressive and black-box nature, which can obscure the influence of different modalities on the generated responses [Ref1; Ref2]. Our approach includes an interpretability mechanism, as detailed in the supplementary material of the corresponding research publication, demonstrating how metadata and multimodal features shape responses and learn sentiments. This controllability and interpretability aim to inspire new methodologies in related fields.

Data Collection and Annotation
Data was collected by crawling Facebook posts from major news outlets, adhering to ethical and legal standards. The comments were annotated using four sentiment analysis models: FLAIR, SentimentR, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT. Facebook was chosen for dataset construction because of the following factors:
• Facebook was chosen for data collection because it uniquely provides metadata such as news article link, post shares, post reaction, comment like, comment rank, comment reaction rank, and relevance scores, not available on other platforms.
• Facebook is the most used social media platform, with 3.07 billion monthly users, compared to 550 million Twitter and 500 million Reddit users. [Ref]
• Facebook is popular across all age groups (18-29, 30-49, 50-64, 65+), with at least 58% usage, compared to 6% for Twitter and 3% for Reddit. [Ref]. Trends are similar for gender, race, ethnicity, income, education, community, and political affiliation [Ref]
• The male-to-female user ratio on Facebook is 56.3% to 43.7%; on Twitter, it's 66.72% to 23.28%; Reddit does not report this data. [Ref]

Filtering Process: To ensure high-quality and reliable data, the dataset underwent two levels of filtering:
a) Model Agreement Filtering: Retained only comments where at least three out of the four models agreed on the sentiment.
b) Probability Range Safety Margin: Comments with a sentiment probability between 0.49 and 0.51, indicating low confidence in sentiment classification, were excluded.
After filtering, 4,512 samples were marked as XX. Though these samples have been released for the reader's understanding, they were not used in training the feedback synthesis model proposed in the corresponding research paper.

Dataset Description
• Total Samples: 61,734
• Total Samples Annotated: 57,222 after filtering.
• Total Posts: 3,646
• Average Likes per Post: 65.1
• Average Likes per Comment: 10.5
• Average Length of News Text: 655 words
• Average Number of Images per Post: 3.7

Components of the Dataset
The dataset comprises two main components:
• CMFeed.csv File: Contains metadata, comment, and reaction details related to each post.
• Images Folder: Contains folders with images corresponding to each post.

Data Format and Fields of the CSV File
The dataset is structured in CMFeed.csv file along with corresponding images in related folders. This CSV file includes the following fields:
• Id: Unique identifier
• Post: The heading of the news article.
• News_text: The text of the news article.
• News_link: URL link to the original news article.
• News_Images: A path to the folder containing images related to the post.
• Post_shares: Number of times the post has been shared.
• Post_reaction: A JSON object capturing reactions (like, love, etc.) to the post and their counts.
• Comment: Text of the user comment.
• Comment_like: Number of likes on the comment.
• Comment_reaction_rank: A JSON object detailing the type and count of reactions the comment received.
• Comment_link: URL link to the original comment on Facebook.
• Comment_rank: Rank of the comment based on engagement and relevance.
• Score: Sentiment score computed based on the consensus of sentiment analysis models.
• Agreement: Indicates the consensus level among the sentiment models, ranging from -4 (all negative) to 4 (all positive). 3 negative and 1 positive will result into -2 and 3 positives and 1 negative will result into +2.
• Sentiment_class: Categorizes the sentiment of the comment into 1 (positive) or 0 (negative).

More Considerations During Dataset Construction
We thoroughly considered issues such as the choice of social media platform for data collection, bias and generalizability of the data, selection of news handles/websites, ethical protocols, privacy and potential misuse before beginning data collection. While achieving completely unbiased and fair data is unattainable, we endeavored to minimize biases and ensure as much generalizability as possible. Building on these considerations, we made the following decisions about data sources and handling to ensure the integrity and utility of the dataset:

• Why not merge data from different social media platforms? We chose not to merge data from platforms such as Reddit and Twitter with Facebook due to the lack of comprehensive metadata, clear ethical guidelines, and control mechanisms—such as who can comment and whether users' anonymity is maintained—on these platforms other than Facebook. These factors are critical for our analysis. Our focus on Facebook alone was crucial to ensure consistency in data quality and format.

• Choice of four news handles: We selected four news handles—BBC News, Sky News, Fox News, and NY Daily News—to ensure diversity and comprehensive regional coverage. These news outlets were chosen for their distinct regional focuses and editorial perspectives: BBC News is known for its global coverage with a centrist view, Sky News offers geographically targeted and politically varied content learning center/right in the UK/EU/US, Fox News is recognized for its right-leaning content in the US, and NY Daily News provides left-leaning coverage in New York. Many other news handles such as NDTV, The Hindu, Xinhua, and SCMP are also large-scale but may contain information in regional languages such as Indian and Chinese, hence, they have not been selected. This selection ensures a broad spectrum of political discourse and audience engagement.

• Dataset Generalizability and Bias: With 3.07 billion of the total 5 billion social media users, the extensive user base of Facebook, reflective of broader social media engagement patterns, ensures that the insights gained are applicable across various platforms, reducing bias and strengthening the generalizability of our findings. Additionally, the geographic and political diversity of these news sources, ranging from local (NY Daily News) to international (BBC News), and spanning political spectra from left (NY Daily News) to right (Fox News), ensures a balanced representation of global and political viewpoints in our dataset. This approach not only mitigates regional and ideological biases but also enriches the dataset with a wide array of perspectives, further solidifying the robustness and applicability of our research.

• Dataset size and diversity: Facebook prohibits the automatic scraping of its users' personal data. In compliance with this policy, we manually scraped publicly available data. This labor-intensive process requiring around 800 hours of manual effort, limited our data volume but allowed for precise selection. We followed ethical protocols for scraping Facebook data , selecting 1000 posts from each of the four news handles to enhance diversity and reduce bias. Initially, 4000 posts were collected; after preprocessing (detailed in Section 3.1), 3646 posts remained. We then processed all associated comments, resulting in a total of 61734 comments. This manual method ensures adherence to Facebook’s policies and the integrity of our dataset.

Ethical considerations, data privacy and misuse prevention
The data collection adheres to Facebook’s ethical guidelines [<a href="https://developers.facebook.com/terms/"

This dataset covers aspects of online politics in 25 democracies: 15 relatively old established European democracies (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom); five non-European veteran democracies (Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand); two early (Portugal, Spain) and three late (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland) third-wave (young) European democracies. The research population includes, in each country, parties that won 4% or more of the votes in two consecutive elections before April 2019 (a total of 141 parties and 145 leaders). The dataset includes external party level information such as performance in the last national elections, governmental status, party age, populism affiliation and leadership selection method. It also includes information related to the party leaders such as their term in leadership office and other formal positions. In addition it includes information about online activity mainly on the consumption (user related activities) of the parties and their leaders in Facebook and Twitter two of the most used social media platforms for political purposes.