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WhaTools/political-whatsapp-channels

Political party WhatsApp channels An open dataset of European political parties' presence on WhatsApp, with the public follower counts of their Channels tracked over time. Published under CC BY 4.0 by WhaTools (https://wha.tools). Parties tracked: 415 (80 with a WhatsApp Channel, 80 with at least one follower reading) Follower readings: 967 Live source page: https://wha.tools/political-parties-whatsapp-channels Canonical repo (JSON + geography + full history):… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/WhaTools/political-whatsapp-channels.

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Political party WhatsApp channels

An open dataset of European political parties' presence on WhatsApp, with the public follower counts of their Channels tracked over time. Published under CC BY 4.0 by WhaTools (https://wha.tools).

  • —Parties tracked: 415 (80 with a WhatsApp Channel, 80 with at least one follower reading)
  • —Follower readings: 967
  • —Live source page: https://wha.tools/political-parties-whatsapp-channels
  • —Canonical repo (JSON + geography + full history): https://github.com/procom-dev/political-whatsapp-channels

Tables

FileGrainWhat it is
parties.csvone row per partyThe curated registry, flattened: identity, place (ISO 3166 country/region + free-text city), political affiliation (European Parliament group, europarty, derived orientation), the party's WhatsApp Channel/other surface, and its latest live follower reading.
observations.csvone row per checkThe append-only measurement log — every follower reading of every surface, successes and failures alike. Join to parties.csv on channel_id.

Join key: observations.channel_id → parties.channel_id (or parties.other_id). observations.party_id → parties.party_id.

How the numbers are read

A WhatsApp Channel's public preview page shows its follower count, so a scheduled job reads whatever is due and appends the reading. Counts are read exactly, never rounded by us: WhatsApp prints a rounded count in English but the whole number in some languages, so the collector requests de-DE — the precision column records which it got. A failed check is recorded with a status and no number; a count is never stored as 0 to mean "unknown".

Scope and limitations

  • —Political parties and their territorial branches only — a youth wing, a parliamentary group, a campaign or an activist movement is out of scope.
  • —Europe today. The schema is global; coverage is European.
  • —Orientation is derived from the European Parliament group, not asserted; a manual override always cites a source.
  • —A follower count is a public vanity metric, not an audience or a vote count.

Citation

Cite via the Zenodo concept DOI (always resolves to the latest version): <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22206853>

Licence & attribution

CC BY 4.0 — <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>. When you use this data, credit WhaTools (https://wha.tools) and link back to https://wha.tools/political-parties-whatsapp-channels.