New Momentum investigates social and societal undercurrents on social media and helps clients and partners such as municipalities, NGOs, artists, and universities understand, interpret and positively influence social change on the internet.

General
When a client contacts us to start a project or research, we need some personal data from them. These are general data such as name, email address, and phone number. We use this personal data only for the purpose(s) for which we received them. For example, we do not send marketing materials unless we have received permission to do so. We also do not pass on data to third parties unless otherwise indicated or if there is a legal obligation to do so.

For data collection, analysis, and visualization during research, we use the research tools and infrastructure of our non-profit branch, Stichting New Momentum. The foundation aims to strengthen open debate and media literacy in the digital society. To this end, the foundation makes the research infrastructure available under an open-source license (CC BY-NC). For more information, see: www.newmomentum.org.

We start every research project by specifically searching for public social media posts and/or profiles related to the subject of the research. For example: posts with statements about social and societal issues or campaigns. We investigate patterns, not profiles. In our presentations and reports, we will rarely highlight individual messages or users unless they are public figures. This complies with European privacy legislation (AVG).

Research, data sources, and algorithms
We collect data that we anonymize from:

• Twitter: Twitter data is collected via the Twitter API 2.0. Twitter has audited our use case and granted us Elevated Access, which means we can collect data faster and more comprehensively than is possible with public access to the API. Since April 2023, Twitter requires all API users to pay for access.
• YouTube: We collect YouTube data via the YouTube Data API. YouTube has audited our use case and increased our rate limits, which means we can collect data faster than with public access.
• Instagram and TikTok: We obtain Instagram and TikTok data from various external providers connected to the Rapid API platform. The data we collect there are public but not available in large quantities and within a short period. In some cases, we pay Rapid API to collect data faster.

The data from these sources are analyzed and processed using the following algorithms:

• We use the so-called Louvain– and Leiden algorithms to search for closely connected clusters in networks.
• We use the PageRank, Betweenness-Centrality, and Eigenvector-Centrality algorithms to find influential nodes in networks.
• We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to search for topics in large corpi texts.
• We use Amazon Rekognition‘s image classification to recognize texts and objects in images.

For all these cases, we combine quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques to interpret the findings of algorithms.

Security and retention periods
We do not keep data longer than necessary. For each project, for example, we store the collected data for up to one month after the transfer of the project results, after which the data is deleted from our files. Until then, we keep the data in a unique, protected database.

Third Parties
To conduct research safely and efficiently and to communicate with our clients during the execution of our projects, we use the following suppliers:

• Microsoft (Office 365; Azure AD);
• Proton (mail, agenda, file sharing, VPN);
• Amazon (SSO; DynamoDB, S3, Neo4j)

We have a data processing agreement with each of these suppliers to ensure compliance with our obligations under the GDPR and to protect all data in our databases. The processing and storage of all data in our possession takes place within the area of the EEA/EU.

Your Rights
You have the right to access, rectify or erase your personal data, or restrict its processing, as well as the right to object to the processing and the right to data portability. You also have the right to withdraw your consent for processing where applicable.

The deletion of data is limited to where the data is necessary for the execution of a contract to which the data subject is a party, or for another necessary reason, such as a legal obligation.

For exercising your rights, complaints, and other inquiries, you can contact our privacy contact person via privacy@newmomentum.net. For additional information, you can also visit the website of the Dutch Data Protection Authority: https://www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/nl.

28 April 2023.