TED-On: A Total Error Framework for Digital Traces of Human Behavior on Online Platforms

Understand

Peoples' activities and opinions recorded as digital traces online, especially on social media and other web-based platforms, offer increasingly informative pictures of the public.

• They promise to allow inferences about populations beyond the users of the platforms on which the traces are recorded, representing real potential for the Social Sciences and a complement to survey-based research.
• But the use of digital traces brings its own complexities and new error sources to the research enterprise.
• Recently, researchers have begun to discuss the errors that can occur when digital traces are used to learn about humans and social phenomena.