This paper considers how parents use the social media platform Instagram to facilitate the capture, curation and sharing of 'family snapshots'. Our work draws upon established cross-disciplinary literature relating to film photography and the composition of family albums in order to establish whether social media has changed the way parents visually present their families. We conducted a qualitative visual analysis of a sample of 4,000 photographs collected from Instagram using hashtags relating to children and parenting. We show that the style and composition of snapshots featuring children remains fundamentally unchanged and continues to be dominated by rather bland and idealised images of the happy family and the cute child. In addition, we find that the frequent taking and sharing of photographs via Instagram has inevitably resulted in a more mundane visual catalogue of daily life. We note a tension in the desire to use social media as a means to evidence good parenting, while trying to effectively manage the social identity of the child and finally, we note the reluctance of parents to use their own snapshots to portray family tension or disharmony, but their willingness to use externally generated content for this purpose.

Increasing numbers of individuals describe themselves as feeling lonely, regardless of age, gender or geographic location. This article investigates how social media users self-disclose feelings of loneliness, and how they seek and provide support to each other. Motivated by related studies in this area, a dataset of 22,477 Twitter posts sent over a one-week period was analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Through a thematic analysis, we demonstrate that self-disclosure of perceived loneliness takes a variety of forms, from simple statements of "I'm lonely", through to detailed self-reflections of the underlying causes of loneliness. The analysis also reveals forms of online support provided to those who are feeling lonely. Further, we conducted a quantitative linguistic content analysis of the dataset which revealed patterns in the data, including that 'lonely' tweets were significantly more negative than those in a control sample, with levels of negativity fluctuating throughout the week and posts sent at night being more negative than those sent in the daytime.

The ubiquitous use of social platforms across the globe makes them attractive options for investigating social phenomena including migration. However, the use of social media data raises several crucial ethical issues around the areas of informed consent, anonymity and profiling of individuals, which are particularly sensitive when looking at a population such as migrants, which is often considered as ‘vulnerable’. In this paper, we discuss how the opportunities and challenges related to social media research in the context of migration impact on the development of large-scale scientific projects. Building on the EU-funded research project PERCEPTIONS, we explore the concrete challenges experienced in such projects regarding profiling, informed consent, bias, data sharing and ethical approval procedures, as well as the strategies used to mitigate them. We draw from lessons learned in this project to discuss implications and recommendations to researchers, funders and university ethics review panels. This paper contributes to the growing discussion on the ethical challenges associated with big social data research projects on migration by highlighting concrete aspects stakeholders should be looking for and questioning when involved in such large-scale scientific projects where collaboration, data sharing and transformation and practicalities are of importance.

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