Measuring online politics comparatively across Europe

Most studies related to online politics require the operationalization and measurement of relevant forms of political opinions. Examples of these studies include the study of online polarization, the spread and the moderation of misinformation, political biases in algorithms, among many others. In this presentation we will consider computational methods theoretically anchored in compared politics, aiming at using social media trace data to position large numbers of platform users in ideology and issue dimensions in a way that is comparable across countries. This comparability, we will show, is essential to the development of frameworks of study for social media at European scale, and for the audit of platforms as mandated by recent EU regulations such as the DSA. We will illustrate this applicability through a number of case studies on content moderation and alogirth auditing.