Mapping the Romanian Facebook Misinformation Network

ABSTRACT

Social media is widely considered to be a breeding ground for misinformation and disinformation. The current paper looks at some of the most important Romanian influences on Facebook to analyze their networks - how many followers engage with the content they are posting how active their followers are, and to what extent are followers shared among different influences. To perform the analysis, 360 posts have been downloaded, together with comments and shares;there have been 126,784 comments and shares in the final analysis from 75,519 distinct followers. Results show that overlap of followers is not significant, with only a few clusters (i.e., influences sharing many of theirfollowers) being visible. Graphical visualization of some networks and clusters are also provided, using the Gephi specialized software.