It Doesn't Break Just on Twitter. Characterizing Facebook content During Real World Events

Multiple studies in the past have analyzed the role and dynamics of the Twitter social network during real world events. However, little work has explored the content of other social media services, or compared content across two networks during real world events. We believe that social media platforms like Facebook also play a vital role in disseminating information on the Internet during real world events. In this work, we study and characterize the content posted on the world’s biggest social network, Facebook, and present a comparative analysis of Facebook and Twitter content posted during 16 real world events. Contrary to existing notion that Facebook is used mostly as a private network, our findings reveal that more than 30% of public content that was present on Facebook during these events, was also present on Twitter. We then performed qualitative analysis on the content spread by the most active users during these events, and found that over 10% of the most active users on both networks post spam content. We used stylometric features from Facebook posts and tweet text to classify this spam content, and were able to achieve an accuracy of over 99% for Facebook, and over 98% for Twitter. This work is aimed at providing researchers with an overview of Facebook content during real world events, and serve as basis for more in-depth exploration of its various aspects like information quality, and credibility during real world events.