A new alliance has been set up to provide academic researchers with access to the data of smaller social networking platforms such as Reddit, Twitch, Imgur, Stack Exchange and Fark.
Researchers are able to obtain data by simply contacting the Digital Ecologies Research Partnership (DERP), where they will then be put in touch with an appropriate team member.
Each team member working for the alliance represents a certain platform and is able to access collected data and hand it over to external researchers working for an educational institution.
The aim here is to work around the fact that smaller platforms are commonly unable to set up specific teams to research community trends and collect data, unlike larger platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
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