This repository contains data to reproduce the findings featured in our story, "Facebook Says 'Technical Issues' Were the Cause of Broken Promise to Congress" from our series, Citizen Browser.
Our methodology is described in "Facebook Said It Would Stop Pushing Users to Join Partisan Political Groups. It Didn’t." and "How We Built a Facebook Inspector".
The data/ directory contains several spreadsheets.
political_group_recs_over_time.csv contains the number of political groups recommended to Citizen Browser panelists daily from December 1st 2020 to February 10th 2021. We only count groups recommended to at least three panelists.
panelists_over_time.csv contains the daily count of panels' data we collected.
political_group_recs.csv contains granular data about political groups recommended over time.
| column | description |
|---|---|
| collection_datetime | The date the group was recommended to panelists. |
| group_slug | The unique identifier for the group. https://facebook.com/groups/{group_slug} |
| n_user_recommend | The number of panelists who were recommended this Facebook Group |
| group_name | The name of the Facebook Group |
| n_members | The max number of members in the Facebook Group during the collection_datetime |
group_membership_growth.csv contains the daily membership growth rates before and after January 19th, 2021.
| column | description |
|---|---|
| group_slug | The unique identifier for the group. https://facebook.com/groups/{group_slug} |
| group_name | The name of the Facebook Group |
| n_members_Jan-19 | The number of members in the Facebook Group on Jan 19 This is from our data |
| n_members_Feb-11 | The number of members in the Facebook Group on Feb 11. This is from visiting "about" section of groups |
| users/day_Jan-19_to_Feb-11 | The number of daily net users that join or leave a group after Jan 19th. Derived from n_members_Feb-11 - n_members_Jan-19 / 22 days |
| users/day_Dec_to_Jan-19 | The number of daily net users that join or leave a group before Jan 19th. Derived from n_members_Jan_19 - n_members_Prior / X days. The prior date is the earliest occurance for panelists |
| percent_change | The percent change between daily membership changes before and after Jan 19th. users/day_Jan-19_to_Feb-11 - users/day_Dec_to_Jan-19 / users/day_Dec_to_Jan-19 |
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