Gathering posts, comments, images or metadata from platforms, by hand or with tools. Check the ethics and the terms of use first.
Key thinkers: danah boyd, Alice Marwick, Jean Burgess
The longer story
Social media data collection harvests digital traces at scale—posts, comments, shares, timestamps, networks. APIs provide structured access (when platforms permit). Web scraping grabs what's publicly visible. The data is massive but partial: you see behaviour, not intention; content, not context. Platform changes break your methods. Ethical issues abound: just because it's public doesn't mean people consented to being researched. Combine with other methods to interpret what the numbers mean. Data without context is noise.