Hey, is anybody watching Facebook?

The Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 kicked off a flurry of social media activity that was equal parts well-meaning and counterproductive. Users on Facebook and Twitter shared reports, updates and photos of victims, spending little time on verifying them before sharing them with thousands of people.

Others on forums like Reddit and 4chan started to zero in on ‘suspects’ in photos of people seen with backpacks. Despite the amount of distress and disruption these activities, the social media broadly also served to channel grief and help, and became a notable part of the Boston Marathon bombings story.

In our daily lives, these platforms serve as news forums. With each person connected to hundreds of others, there is a strong magnification of information, especially once it crosses a threshold. They make it easier for everybody to be news-mongers (not journalists). Add this to the idea that using a social network can just as easily be a social performance, and you realize how the sharing of news can also be part of the performance.

Consider Facebook: Unlike Twitter, it enables users to share information in a variety of forms – status updates, questions, polls, videos, galleries, pages, groups, etc – allowing whatever news to retain its multifaceted attitude, and imposing no character limit on what you have to say about it.

Facebook v. Twitter

So you’d think people who want the best updates on breaking news would go to Facebook, and that’s where you might be wrong. ‘Might’ because, on the one hand, Twitter has a lower response time, keeps news very accessible, encourages a more non-personal social media performance, and has a high global reach. These reasons have also made Twitter a favorite among researchers who want to study how information behaves on a social network.

On the other hand, almost 30% of the American general population gets its news from Facebook, with Twitter and YouTube at par with a command of 10%, if a Pew Research Center technical report is to be believed. Other surveys have also shown that there are more people from India who are on Facebook than on Twitter. At this point, it’d just seem inconsiderate when you realize Facebook does have 1.28 billion monthly active users from around the world.

Since 2013, Facebook has made it easier for users to find news in its pages. In June that year, it introduced the #hashtagging facility to let users track news updates across various conversations. In September, it debuted Graph Search, making it easier for people to locate topics they wanted to know more about. Even though the platform’s allowance for privacy settings stunts the kind of free propagation of information that’s possible on Twitter (and only 28% of Facebook users made any of their content publicly available), Facebook’s volume of updates enables its fraction of public updates rise to levels comparable with those of Twitter.

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and Prateek Dewan, from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi (IIIT-D), leveraged this to investigate how Facebook and Twitter compared when sharing information on real-world events. Kumaraguru explained his motivation: “Facebook is so famous, especially in India. It’s much bigger in terms of the number of users. Also, having seen so many studies on Twitter, we were curious to know if the same outcomes as from work done on Twitter would hold for Facebook.”

The duo used the social networks’ respective APIs to query for keywords related to 16 events that occurred during 2013. They explain, “Eight out of the 16 events we selected had more than 100,000 posts on both Facebook and Twitter; six of these eight events saw over 1 million tweets.” Their pre-print paper was submitted to arXiv on May 19.

An upper hand

In all, they found that an unprecedented event appeared on Facebook just after 11 minutes while on Twitter, according to a 2014 study from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), it took over ten times as longer. Specifically, after the Boston Marathon bombings, “the first [relevant] Facebook post occurred just 1 minute 13 seconds after the first blast, which was 2 minutes 44 seconds before the first tweet”.

However, this order-of-magnitude difference could be restricted to Kumaraguru’s choice of events because the AAAI study claims breaking news was broken fastest during 29 major events on Twitter, although it considered only updates on trending topics (and the first update on Twitter, according to them, appeared after two hours).

The data-mining technique could also have played a role in offsetting the time taken for an event to be detected because it requires the keywords being searched to be manually keyed. Finally, the Facebook API is known to be more rigorous than Twitter’s, whose ability to return older tweets is restricted. On the downside, the output from the Facebook API is restricted by users’ privacy settings.

Nevertheless, Kumaraguru’s conclusions paint a picture of Facebook being just as resourceful as Twitter when tracking real-world events – especially in India – leaving news discoverability to take the blame. Three of the 16 chosen events were completely local to India, and they were all accompanied by more activity on Facebook than on Twitter.

Even after the duo corrected for URLs shared on both social networks simultaneously (through clients like Buffer and HootSuite) – 0.6% of the total – Facebook had the upper hand not just in primacy but also origin. According to Kumaraguru and Dewan, “2.5% of all URLs shared on Twitter belonged to the facebook.com domain, but only 0.8% of all URLs shared on Facebook belonged to the twitter.com domain.”

Facebook also seemed qualitatively better because spam was present in only five events. On Twitter, spam was found to be present in 13. This disparity can be factored in by programs built to filter spam from social media timelines in real-time, the sort of service that journalists will find very useful.

Kumaraguru and Dewan resorted to picking out spam based on differences in sentence styles. This way, they were able to avoid missing spam that was stylistically conventional but irrelevant in terms of content, too. A machine wouldn’t have been able to do this just as well and in real-time unless it was taught – in much the same way you teach your Google Mail inbox to automatically sort email.

Digital information forensics

Patrick Meier, a self-proclaimed – but reasonably so – pioneer in the emerging field of humanitarian technologies, wrote a blog post on April 28 describing a browser extension called TweetCred which is just this sort of learning machine. Install it and open Twitter in your browser. Above each tweet, you will now see a credibility rating bar that grades each tweet out of 7 points, with 7 describing the most credibility.

If you agree with each rating, you can bolster with a thumbs-up that appears on hover. If you disagree, you can give the shown TweetCred rating a thumbs down and mark what you think is correct. Meier makes it clear that, in its first avatar, the app is geared toward rating disaster/crisis tweets. A paper describing the app was submitted to arXiv on May 21, co-authored by Kumaraguru, Meier, Aditi Gupta (IIIT-D) and Carlos Castillo (Qatar Computing Research Institute).

Between the two papers, a common theme is the origin and development of situational awareness. We stick to Twitter for our breaking news because it’s conceptually similar to Facebook, fast and importantly cuts to the chase, so to speak. Parallely, we’re also aware that Facebook is similarly equipped to reconstruct details because of its multimedia options and timeline. Even if Facebook and Twitter the organizations believe that they are designed to accomplish different things, the distinction blurs in the event of a real-world crisis.

“Both these networks spread situational awareness, and both do it fairly quickly, as we found in our analysis,” Kumaraguru said. “We’d like to like to explore the credibility of content on Facebook next.” But as far as establishing a mechanism to study the impact of Facebook and Twitter on the flow of information is concerned, the authors have exposed a facet of Facebook that Facebook, Inc., could help leverage.