Workshop Proceedings of the 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Workshop: CySoc 2025: 6th International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats

DOI: 10.36190/2025.15

Published: 2025-06-05
A Public Dataset Tracking Social Media Discourse about the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election on Twitter/X
Ashwin Balasubramanian, Vito Zou, Hitesh Narayana, Christina You, Luca Luceri, Emilio Ferrara

In this paper, we introduce the first release of a large-scale dataset capturing discourse on X (a.k.a., Twitter) in the runup to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Our dataset comprises 46 million publicly available posts on X, collected from May 1, 2024, to November 30, 2024, using a custom-built scraper, which we describe in detail. By employing targeted keywords linked to key political figures, events, and emerging issues, we aligned data collection with the election cycle to capture evolving public sentiment and the dynamics of political engagement on social media. This dataset offers researchers a robust foundation to investigate critical questions about the influence of social media in shaping political discourse, the propagation of election-related narratives, and the spread of misinformation.We also present a preliminary analysis that highlights prominent hashtags and keywords within the dataset, offering initial insights into the dominant themes and conversations occurring in the lead-up to the election.