Nearly 500,000 Facebook posts from U.S. state legislators between 2020 and 2021 are analyzed for low-factual content. The data reveals less than 1% of posts contain misinformation, with sharing rates higher among Republican legislators and in certain states. It was created by Tai, Yuehong Cassandra to study institutional and ideological checks on misinformation spread.
Use Cases
- Analyze the prevalence of low-factual content across different states to identify regional misinformation hotspots.
- Investigate the correlation between legislator political affiliation (e.g., Republican) and rates of sharing low-factual content.
- Examine the relationship between legislative professionalism and the propensity to share misinformation.
- Model the interaction between district political leaning (conservative vs. liberal) and a legislator's likelihood to post low-factual information.
Strengths
- Large-scale collection of nearly 500,000 social media posts from public officials.
- Covers a specific and relevant two-year period from 2020 to 2021.
- Includes validated measures for detecting low-factual content, a key metric in misinformation studies.
Limitations
- Limited temporal scope to two years, which may not capture long-term trends or changes in misinformation sharing.
- Focus is exclusively on U.S. state legislators, limiting generalizability to federal officials or other countries.
- The raw description indicates the overall prevalence of low-factual content is rare (less than 1%), which may limit statistical power for certain analyses.
Provenance
- Source
- Tai, Yuehong Cassandra
- Collection Method
- Collected and analyzed nearly 500,000 Facebook posts from U.S. state legislators.
- Time Range
- 2020 to 2021
- Freshness
- null
- Geography
- United States (state-level legislators)