Seedlist: What changed in 2025? What’s coming in 2026?

Our data collection begins with the seedlist. A seed (or entity) is a person, group, organization, or media product that is of substantive interest to Canada’s media ecosystem. A seedlist is a data table in which each row represents a unique seed and the columns contain a unique seed ID, the seed’s social media handles, and other demographic data such as the seed type and location. At the start of the pipeline, the seedlist tells each platform crawler which handles to collect data from. At the end of the pipeline, the seedID is used to join the collected post data to the authoring seed’s demographic variables.

Throughout 2025, the seedlist underwent numerous updates and clean-ups. The most exciting changes include the addition of federal election candidates (followed by an update reflecting the election results) as well as the expansion into the US sphere with the addition of the top 500 US influencers. In this post, we share a monthly summary of how the seedlist changed in 2025 as well as a sneak peek into the changes to come in 2026.

Seedlist Updates in 2025:

March:

• Updated or deactivated non-elected candidates from the 2024 British Columbia provincial election. Seeds that met the seedlist criteria for “influencers” had their SubType updated to “influencer” and those that did not meet any other seedlist criteria were deactivated.

April:

• Federal election candidates from the following 6 federal parties added: LPC, CPC, NDP, BQ, Green, and PPC

August:

• Updated SubType (“member of parliament”) for elected federal candidates, updated or deactivated non-elected federal candidates. Non-elected seeds that met the seedlist criteria for “influencers” had their SubType updated to “influencer” and those that did not meet any other seedlist criteria were deactivated.

September:

• Comprehensive review and correction of SubType values for active “influencer” seeds

October:

• Bluesky added as a new platform and Bluesky handles added for all active seeds
• All handles that did not post in the last 12 months were reviewed. Handles were corrected in case of typos. Handles were deactivated after confirming its inactivity and were replaced if the seed migrated to a new account.

November:

• Top 500 US political influencers (in terms of follower count) added to the seedlist under a new “us_influencer” collection

December:

• All provincial legislature members updated to include any missed provincial elections from October 2024 to November 2025 (NB, SK, NS, ON, and NL)
• Identified, reviewed, and added the most mentioned influencers by existing seeds.

Upcoming updates in early 2026:

• More influencers from under-represented platforms (Bluesky and TikTok) will be added
• Infotainment (engagement driven, hyper-local culture/entertainment/news accounts) seeds will be added as a new SubType under the “influencer” MainType
• All seeds will be enriched with the demographic information
  • Persons: Gender, age range, occupation, main language
  • Organizations: Domain, main language, parent organization (news outlets), professionally accredited (news outlets)

We hope that the seedlist and the social media data collected through the seedlist continues to support researchers at CMTD and the broader research community in 2026.

For any suggestions and requests for the seedlist, please contact: saewon.park@mcgill.ca