{"product_id":"social-media-observatory-alexei-sisulu-abrahams-9781718503649","title":"Social Media Observatory","description":"\u003cb\u003eGain the technical skills to monitor millions of social media accounts for a panoramic view of online communities.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSocial 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. \u003ci\u003eSocial Media Observatory \u003c\/i\u003eis an in-depth beginner's guide to coding full-stack web applications in Python to track and analyze 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eYou'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 discourse leading up to the January 6 insurrection, and learn to circumvent Meta's and ByteDance's defenses to scrape Instagram and TikTok, collecting evidence of war crimes in the Middle East. Finally, you'll write an API and deploy your observatory to a cloud server to collaborate with other investigators. By the end of the book, you'll have a working website that allows collaborators to log in, request data collection, and perform analysis of collected data, via a point-and-click interface. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAlong the way, you'll learn to: \u003cbr\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eUse Python and RabbitMQ to retrieve Telegram data from a remote API\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eStore data with PostgreSQL and query it with SQLAlchemy\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAnalyze the data you've retrieved with Pandas, NetworkX, Gephi, and other tools\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eUse state-of-the-art AI tools to transcribe audio and classify text\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eDeploy a website with an interactive dashboard using FastAPI, Dash, Cytoscape, Uvicorn\u003cb\u003e, \u003c\/b\u003eGunicorn, Nginx, AWS, and Let's Encrypt\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eContainerize your apps with Docker and provision infrastructure with Pulumi\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhether you're a citizen scientist, a security researcher, a journalist, an activist, or a scholar, \u003ci\u003eSocial Media Observatory\u003c\/i\u003e is an essential blueprint for building your window into online worlds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Alexei Sisulu Abrahams\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1718503644\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781718503649\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e No Starch Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 08\/12\/2025\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 304\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback","brand":"Alexei Sisulu Abrahams","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":46334607524095,"sku":"9781718503649","price":34.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_b3c2695f-d13b-4b44-993e-4ce72c64a94e.jpg?v=1731467295","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/social-media-observatory-alexei-sisulu-abrahams-9781718503649","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}