How the DFRLab used CrowdTangle and CoorNet to track the spread of a viral conspiracy video on Facebook
Despite efforts by major platforms to limit its spread, copies of the widely debunked conspiracy video “Plandemic” continued to multiply and spread largely through niche online conspiracy communities in early May 2020.
The DFRLab used the CrowdTangle API and an R package called CooRNet, developed by Fabio Giglietto, Nicola Righetti, and Luca Rossi, to track the spread of the viral conspiracy through hundreds of Facebook groups.
This project walks through the data analysis portion of the research, providing reproducible code for the key visualizations. The walkthrough is live here: https://dfrlab.github.io/Plandemic/