Investigating Toxic Narratives
Lifaqane Nare
FactCheck Zimbabwe
Introduction
Misinformation around the integrity of voting has been on the rise. Elections in the United States have seen an increase in toxic narratives and conspiracy theories on the integrity of the vote.
Setting up a Social Media Investigation Project
How to construct "significant" lists of actors and "significant" samples of data
¨
Constructing
Sampling
Preparing
List
Top contestants (parties and/or candidates)
List
Top non-contestant
pages and actors
Saved search Divisive Political or
Electoral Issue (1)
Saved search Divisive Political or electoral issue (2)
Top 10 to 30 posts per week (per relevance)
Top 10 to 30 posts per week (per relevance)
Top 10 to 30 posts
per week (per relevance)
Top 10 to 30 posts per week (per relevance)
Analysing
• Political actor?
• Type of post
Topic of post
• Source of post
• Other
• Misuse administrative resources?
• Voter information?
• Hate speech? • Incitement?
• Defamatory speech?
• Dangerous speech?
• Information manipulation? • Disinformation?
• Propaganda?
Search
(institutional criteria)
Search political issues
(relevance criteria)
Setting up cont…
Phase 1
Phase 2
Phase 3
• Select Platforms to monitor
• Select actors to include in lists for monitoring
• Choose keywords to include in queries for monitoring
• Implement lists and queries for Facebook in CrowdTangle
• Implement lists and
queries for X in SentiOne
• Track election ads on
Meta and Google (if available)
• Monitor and extract data
• Aggregate data on Google sheets/Excel
• Create coding grid
• Do quantitative analysis
• Explore qualitative analysis
Selecting Platforms to Monitor
Questions to be answered
» Which social media platforms are most relevant?
» Which are most used by which age groups and social/political actors?
» Which are more prone to information manipulation?
» Is information manipulation prevalent? On which platforms?
» Is the Facebook Ad Library available? Do candidates, supporters use political ads?
» Is Derogatory Speech and Hateful Content an issue? On which platforms? Towards which groups?
» Do government and electoral bodies have social media presence?
» Are political influencers active on social media? If so, on which platforms?
» Check Datareportal Library
» Check DigitalNews Report country data
» Check Statista, etc
» Google Search, platform search and CrowdTangle or similar tools
Selecting Actors to Include on the List
Yes
Maybe
Preparing
List
Official criteria
Constructing
List
Top contestants (parties and/or candidates)
Go to candidates websites and track their presence on
social media
Search for political issues
(platform relevance criteria)
List
Top non-contestants pages and actors
Search and track the most relevant accounts pages or
groups talking about the election
Choose Keywords to Include in Queries
Search for political issues
(platform relevance criteria)
Saved Search
Divisive Political or Electoral Issue (1)
Saved search
Divisive Political or Electoral Issue 2
Electoral Query (e.g)
Elections OR parliamentary elections OR candidate list OR
distribution of seats OR election
law OR confessional system OR confessional seat
Divisive Query (e.g)
Hezbollah OR "era of humiliation OR Iranian occupation OR everyone means everyone OR port explosion OR corruption OR militia OR terrorism OR system
OR your leader OR electricity OR smugglers OR garbage OR decentralization
Choose Keywords to Include in Queries cont…
Create "saved searches" for electoral content and for the divisive or
polarizing issues (e.g. derogatory language; racism)
1. Use starting keywords - like "election" (election related content) and "immigration" or "corruption" (divisive and polarizing content)
2. Run those keywords on Google, X and Facebook search to get other related keywords
3. Construct a search query using Google search operators
4. Test the query to evaluate consistency of search results
5. Apply query to your saved search
Check Election Ads on Meta and Google
Check Election Ads on Meta and Google cont…
Step 1 : Check availability in your country
Assess if there are legal provisions for online political advertising and ask candidates (if available) if they plan on buying online advertising,
and if so, on which online platforms.
Step 2 : Develop a list of official candidates and parties + select key contenders Consider a threshold to limit your list if it is not possible to monitor all in the time period
Step 3: Data collection
Choose a subset of ads per party or candidate, potentially those ads with the most reach.
a) Manually download data per advertiser using Facebook's Ad Library report or Google's Political Ad Transparency Report.
b) Use the Facebook Ad Library API for more in-depth and automated analysis
Step 4: Data analysis
Identifying the key actors
Analysing the data
Thank you!
lifaqane@factcheckzw.org