This repository contains code to reproduce the findings featured in our story: "Biden and Trump Voters Were Exposed to Radically Different Coverage of the Capitol Riot on Facebook" from our series Citizen Browser.
Our methodology is described in "How We Built a Facebook Inspector."
data/citizen-browser-capitol-riots-BIDEN.csv
This CSV file contains the unique links shown to Citizen Browser panelists who reported voting for Joseph Biden in the 2020 U.S. general election, along with a count of the number of panelists who were shown the link.
data/citizen-browser-capitol-riots-TRUMP.csv
This CSV file contains the unique links shown to Citizen Browser panelists who reported voting for Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. general election, along with a count of the number of panelists who were shown the link.
data/citizen-browser-capitol-riots-OVERLAP.csv
This CSV file contains the links that appeared in both the Biden and Trump datasets.
We sought to capture the coverage of the events just before, during, and after the storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021.
Our query requested data observed between Jan. 5, 2021, and Jan. 8, 2021.
We filtered the data to only include observations from Citizen Browser panelists who reported voting for Joseph Biden or Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. general election.
We performed a keyword search for the following terms:
"capitol","riot","protest","mob","rally","capitol hill","dc protests"
We looked for these terms in Facebook posts, link URLs, and the poster's account name and page address.
We excluded any posts flagged as sponsored, any posts that were clearly advertisements, and any links that were not associated with the activity surrounding the riot.
We excluded any posts made by Facebook itself.
We excluded links from any domain that had only one link served in our dataset.
This applies to data/citizen-browser-capitol-riots-BIDEN.csv and data/citizen-browser-capitol-riots-TRUMP.csv.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| timestamp_EST | The date the post was observed in Eastern Standard Time. Format: `YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS` |
| n_users | The number of unique panelists who saw this link. |
| url_domain | The domain of the link. |
| url | The URL of the link. |
| description | The text accompanying the link in the post. |
This applies to data/citizen-browser-capitol-riots-OVERLAP.csv.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| url_domain | The domain of the link. |
| url | The URL of the link. |
| description | The text accompanying the link in the post. |
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