In the spirit of 50 years of the General Social Survey (GSS) measuring social change, the GSS team, in conjunction with NORC’s Social Data Collaboratory (SDC), have created the General Social Media Archive, a new public-use data source of social media data to contextualize and complement other public opinion data, like the GSS. The General Social Media Archive (GSMA) will allow users to identify and track trends and monitor general sentiment about a range of social topics. The archive consists primarily of data from Twitter’s Streaming Application Programming Interface (API) and Twitter’s Historical PowerTrack API. The data is curated by the SDC to include additional information regarding tweet sentiment, tweet source, engagement, and geography. The archive is made up of three data sets:

• Social Data Explorer (SDE) Twitter 1% - random sample of 1% publicly available tweets from January 2019 through February 2022 aggregated by day on the topics of abortion, climate change, gay marriage, gun control, marijuana, and taxation
• PowerTrack All Daily – exhaustive set of tweets focused exclusively on marijuana, from August 2016 through February 2022 aggregated by day
• PowerTrack State Daily – the PowerTrack All Daily data summarized at the state level, from August 2016 through February 2022 aggregated by day

Download the Data

General Social Media Archive data: CSV SAS STATA
General Social Media Archive methodology report