LaclauGPT is a political science multimodal data collection and analysis pipeline. It is called LaclauGPT as a tribute to Ernesto Laclau.
LaclauGPT is developed by Tomi Toivio for three Helsinki Hub on Emotions, Populism and Polarisation research projects funded by the European Union:
- CO3 researches the social contract.
- ENDURE researches the world after the pandemic.
- PLEDGE researches grievance politics.
The pipeline was used to collect and analyze multimodal social media data related to the 2024 European parliament elections. Data was collected from TikTok and Instagram. Data collection started in 1st of May 2024 and continued until the election day in 9th of June 2024. Collection was based on usernames of official election candidates as well as hashtags and search queries related to the elections. Election data was collected for Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Collected and analyzed data cannot be released yet due to GDPR. This open source version uses dummy data.
This TikTok scraper was functional in 2024. The scraper is released for research purposes only.
The scraper consists of two parts:
- Node.js REST API backend.
- Firefox Plugin.
Some JavaScript programming skill is needed to get this working.