To get this insight, i`m using The Outbreak, a tool that i developed.

The Outbreak Part 1. How does the algorithm work

The Outbreak Part 2. How is the workflow designed.

Part 1. Short Explanation.

For each post that shared a link, i measure 2 things:

Total number of shares that the FB post had generated for a post.

2. Total number of shares that that link had generated on all of the facebook pages, profiles or groups were it was shared.

To first understand what i do, we have to look at this post from the FB page Americans Agains the Republican Party. If we look at the red annotation, we can see the number of Shares that this articles had generated, for this post. 8461 shares. This is the number of shares that this FB post got.

But a link get posted by multiple Facebook pages, so how do we get a sense of what is the total number of Facebook Shares for a specific link ?

Simple, we use the facebook API and we gen information's about that link :

We can see that for this post, the total number of shares is over 62K.

Doing a simple math, we can see that the link generated around 15% of the total number of shares.

By comparing the difference, we can learn what percent of the total traffic generated to a post comes from page X.

Donald Trump is contributing with at least 15% of all of the shares of an article.

In other words, we can understand what difference does a page makes in pushing the news in their vertical. If we analyze pages that usually post fake viral news, we can get a understanding of how much do their push their own agenda or they are part of a grater momentum about that specific topic.

If we look for example at the FranklinGraham FB page, we see that more then half of the total shares of the links that he shared were from his FB page. This means if he would stop sharing about that articles, they would lose 60% of their traffic.

Part 2 — Cleaning the data

I first remove all of the links that shared a link on facebook about another facebook status. This removes 14K records that were a “repost”

Part 3 — Interpret the data.

For example Breitbart, a page famous for sharing fake or misleading articles, generate at least 20% of the total number of shares that on articles get.

The number is much higher. For example, if somebody copy paste the link into 100 FB groups, this shares will appear only as the total shares number, not as shares generated by the page.

Bernie Sanders it`s a interesting example, he seems to share news that are more popular, or they are spread by much more people compared with Donald Trump for example, were he leads with almost 25% of the shares of news that he shares.

I`m not sure how to interpret this data, just stumbled yesterday while trying to make some visualizations. I consider that it`s useful to be able to see this information's in a transparent way, so that other data analysts and scientists, journalists can get a better understanding in the propagation of news, viral news and most importantly, fake viral news.

This is a sample of the data that i get,extracting just the Donald Trump latest posts :

You can see a graph with all of the FB pages that i monitor here :

Sorry for the language mistakes in the article, English is not my first language.

About Me

In the last 3 years i`m a collaborator with the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Projects (OCCRP), were i do data analysis and pattern recognition to uncover patterns of corruption in unstructured datasets.

In September 2016 i have moved to San Francisco, to start a new life here. Searching for a Job.

You can find me online on Medium Florin Badita, AngelList, Twitter , Linkedin, Openstreetmap, Github, Quora, Facebook