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Data collected from the Internet–often referred to as digital trace data or ‘big data’–offer new opportunities for researchers to study online social life, while also serving as an instrument to examine broader social phenomena at the intersection of technology and society (Zeller, Chapter 25, this Handbook). Alongside the growth of social media platforms, digital trace data are increasingly generated at an unprecedented rate–every post, status update, snap, tweet, and ‘like’creates a footprint that can be collected, analyzed, and interpreted to tell a story (Engel et al., 2022). The scale and volume of these data are massive, encompassing millions of data points that can take different forms, including text, emojis, pictures, videos, and many others that together comprise extensive repositories of user-generated content and records of online interactions (Kitchin, 2014; Kitchin and McArdle, 2016). As such, researchers working …