Facebook and the 2018 Midterms: A Look at the Data
Analysis of political ads, groups, and rule enforcement on the platform show that the problem is only getting worse
This is the first installment of The Micro-Propaganda Machine, a three-part analysis critically examining the issues at the interface of platforms, propaganda, and politics.
Before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, I took an extensive look into the state of Facebook’s platform and what I found was interesting—and terrifying. Three months and 1,000 screenshots later, my efforts involved collecting more than 250,000 posts, 5,000 political ads, and historic engagement metrics for hundreds of Facebook pages and groups using a diverse set of tools and data resources. Some of my findings were anticipated. Others were not.
The takeaway? It’s not good. Many of the dangers pointed out years ago seem to have grown exponentially on Facebook. But it’s not just isolated to Facebook.
As I told NBC’s David Ingram and The Hill’s Ali Breland, the visibility of extreme content and hate speech on Instagram was possibly the worst I’d ever seen. To make matters worse, there’s been a disturbing pattern of online polarization and radicalization followed by acts of ethnically and ideologically directed violence.
