Social Media Exposed: Track Disinformation, Spot Bots, and Find Out What's Really Happening

Social media has become our modern-day agora, the place where we get our news and engage in political discourse.With disinformation, hate speech, foreign interference, authoritarianism, market monopolization, and political polarization all on the rise, monitoring social media in the public interest has never been so difficult nor so urgent.Social Media Exposed is an in-depth beginner's guide to coding full-stack web applications in Python to track and analyse social media activity at scale, giving you unparalleled insights into the cultural and political conversations of our time, then empowering you to reach your own conclusions.You'll start by coding a web app to monitor Russian disinformation channels discussing Ukraine on Telegram, then learn more adversarial methods to scrape the Wayback Machine, Instagram, and TikTok.You'll detect Twitter bots following Saudi influencers, extract text-embedded URLs to reveal a white supremacist blogosphere, parse archived tweets to reveal the dis