Did Facebook really help spread Fake News?
"Facebook, Check your facts!"
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About

A little bit about the project

Facebook revolutionized the world of social media through concepts such as "like", "share" and "comment". As more users engaged themselves by sharing photos, videos or status updates, Facebook showed users more content that was similar to what they would like/wanted to see. Eventually, this biased algorithm was seen in spreading content on much larger scales such as elections, social protests and so on. This caused a significant amount of biased news to be shared on Facebook pages. Certain sources suggest that Facebook was by far the worst perpetrator when it comes to spreading fake news. This project attempts to analyze the story behind how Facebook helped spread fake news during the 2016 presidential elections, and answer the following questions:

How true are the Facebook posts by prominent media channels?
How Facebook used media channels to engage audience?
Does false news spread faster than news which is true?
Which category of channels are responsible for posting more false news?

The project uses dataset provided by Buzzfeed News. Through various Digital Humanities Tools such as Tableau, Voyant Tools, and web mapping tools such as ESRI and ArcGIS, the project processed and visualized data into figures which helped make it easier to understand. After visualizing the data, the website was published through GitHub pages. The various visualizations help explain the data and answer the above mentioned questions.

Statistics

How did Facebook Pages spread false news to millions of followers and who was responsible for it?

Numbers

The Buzzfeed team gathered data on a total of 2,282 posts: 1,145 mainstream pages, 666 right-wing pages, and 471 left-wing pages. "Occupy Democrats" showed the largest number of fans close to 4.5 million, while "ABC News Politics" had the least, with only about 450,000 fans.

Media

Buzzfeed analyzed of 9 Hyperpartisan Facebook pages: 3 mainstream, 3 left-wing and 3 right-wing pages. The analysis found that 38% of all right-wing posts were either a "mixture of true and false" or "mostly false", while 19% of posts from left-wing pages were either a "mixture of true and false" or "mostly false".

Mark Zuckerberg's Views

Facebook CEO had rejected charges that the social network's promotion of false pro-Trump news articles could have affected the outcome of the presidential election. He said "I think the idea that fake news on Facebook — of which it's a very small amount of the content — influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea."

Visualizations

Some interesting visualizations depicting the dataset.

Process

The data and methodology that formed the base for the analysis and visualizations

  • 1

    Analysing the Dataset

    The dataset consisted of the group of posts (left, right, mainstream), rating, the number of shares and comments per Facebook post, the date published, and type of post. The project analysed the dataset to figure out what story can be narrated.
    How can the story be depicted? What data visualizations tools can be used?

  • 2

    Contents of the Website

    The next step was to prepare a structure for the website according to the dataset and story. The structure included an 'about' page, statistics, visualizations including a map, a timeline describing the methodology, and bibliography used in the project.

  • 3

    Visualizations and Map

    The project used Tableau to create the bar charts and bubble chart, and Voyant Tools to generate the word clouds. The map was created using ArcGIS Online. All the visualizations were embedded into an interactive ESRI Story Map, to give it a story-like feeling!

  • 4

    Publishing the website

    For creating the website, the project used Jekyll, a site generator that uses HTML. Next, all the components were embedded into the website, including the ESRI Story Map containing the visualizations. The website then used GitHub for publishing.

  • And
    Voila!






Bibliography

Dataset: https://github.com/ BuzzFeedNews/2016-10-facebook-fact-check
Google Maps - Coordinates for location of media agencies

Buzzfeed News article "Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate" - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis

Buzzfeed News article "Mark Zuckerberg Says Fake News On Facebook Didn’t Change The Election" - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/zuckerberg-techonomy-fake-news-election

https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2020/03/21/facebook-spreads-fake-news-faster-than-any-other-social-website-according-to-new-research/?sh=4d38ff66e1a9



This website was designed for a project in DH 201: Intro to Digital Humanities course at UCLA. I thank Professor Miriam for providing us with this wonderful opportunity to share the skills and knowledge that we learnt during the course through this website, and for her constant guidance and feedback throughout the project. I also want to thank my dear friend, Arunabh Ghosh for his never ending support and determination in helping me figure out Jekyll and its various issues with publishing! Lastly, thank you to all my wonderful peers of DH 201 for teaching me something new everyday!



Project by Malavika Vinod