Can-PolNews: A Multi-Platform Dataset of Political Discourse in Canada

Abstract

For many societies, social media has become the primary venue for encountering and engaging with political discourse. But whereas ideas and conversations span multiple communities and move fluidly between different platforms, publicly available datasets are often limited to a single platform. In this paper, we present a multi-platform social media dataset focused on political discourse in Canada, spanning January 1st, 2023, to January 1st, 2025. Our dataset contains all content posted to social media by Canadian news media (national,provincial, and local) and Canadian politicians (federal and provincial) for 1,852 unique accounts across four major platforms popular among Canadians: Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. Politicians are labeled by their political party affiliations and provinces, facilitating comparative analysis of regional political trends and ideological affinities. By covering a two-year time frame, this dataset, containing more than 5 million posts with a normalized schema across four platforms, enables researchers to analyze patterns and trends of digital political engagement, and the interplay of news and political elites on social media in an established democracy.