Analyzing the Evolution of Disinformation Content on Facebook - a Pilot Study

ABSTRACT

Disinformation spread on social media generates a truly massive amount of content on a daily basis, much of it not quite duplicated but repetitive and related. In this paper, we present an approach for clustering social media posts based on topic modeling in order to identify and formalize an underlying structure in all the noise. This would be of great benefit for tracking evolving trends, analyzing large-scale campaigns, and focusing efforts on debunking or community outreach. The steps we took in particular include harvesting through CrowdTangle huge collection of Facebook posts explicitly identified as containing disinformation by debunking experts, following those links back to the people, pages and groups where they were shared then collecting all posts shared on those channels over an extended period of time. This generated a very large textual dataset which was used in the topic modeling experiments attempting to identify the larger trends in the available data. Finally, the results were transformed and collected in a Knowledge Graph for further study and analysis. Our main goal is to investigate different trends and common patterns in disinformation campaigns, and whether there exist some correlations between some of them. For instance, for some of the most recent social media posts related to COVID-19 and political situation in Ukraine. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.