This repository contains code to reproduce the findings featured in our story, "Facebook Said It Would Stop Pushing Users to Join Partisan Political Groups. It Didn’t." from our series, Citizen Browser.
Our methodology is described in "How We Built a Facebook Inspector".
The data/ directory contains several spreadsheets.
top_100_groups.csv contains the top 100 groups recommended to our 1,917 panelists in December 2020.
top_groups_political.csv contains the subset of 11 political groups from the top 100 recommended groups.
We also have the same spreadsheets for Biden (N=1,214), Trump (N=508) and non-voters (N=155).
top_100_groups_{X}_voters.csv contains the top 100 groups recommended to X-voters in December 2020.
top_groups_political_{X}_voters.csv contains the subset of political groups from the top 100 recommended groups for X-voters.
Each of these spreadsheets in formatted similarly, containing some subset of the following columns.
| column | description |
|---|---|
| rank | The index of each csv file is the rank of how many panelists were recommended the Facebook Group |
| group_name | The name of the Facebook Group |
| n_user_recommend | The number of panelists who were recommended this Facebook Group |
| n_user_timeline | The number of panelists who were broadcast this group on their timeline in December 2020 |
| posts_per_day | The max number of daily posts by the Facebook Group |
| n_members | The max number of members in the Facebook Group |
| n_user_recommend_by_friend | The number of users (subset of n_user_recommend) who had a mutual friend in the Facebook Group |
| n_panelists | The number of panelists in this bucket of users |
| %_user_recommend | n_user_recommend / n_panelists |
| is_political | Whether or not the Facebook Group was determined to be political based on the name, rules, and discussion. |
| political_lean | The political orientation (L or R) of the Facebook Group based on the name, rules, and discussion. |
| group_slug | The unique identifier for the group. https://facebook.com/groups/{group_slug} |
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