Special issue on analysis and mining of social media data

This Editorial introduces the PeerJ Computer Science Special Issue on Analysis and Mining of Social Media Data. The special issue called for submissions with a primary focus on the use of social media data, for a variety of fields including natural language processing, computational social science, data mining, information retrieval and recommender systems. Of the 48 abstract submissions that were deemed within the scope of the special issue and were invited to submit a full article, 17 were ultimately accepted. These included a diverse set of articles covering, inter alia, sentiment analysis, detection and mitigation of online harms, analytical studies focused on societal issues and analysis of images surrounding news. The articles primarily use Twitter, Facebook and Reddit as data sources; English, Arabic, Italian, Russian, Indonesian and Javanese as languages; and over a third of the articles revolve around COVID-19 as the main topic of study. This article discusses the motivation for launching such a special issue and provides an overview of the articles published in the issue.