The F2N2 team decided to make a short analysis which shows the trajectory of a fake news and how much it can travel, especially if the author of that fake news is an official. At the same time, the aim is to show the lightness with which the media transmit it, without conducting any research in order to confirm/deny the transmitted news.
Namely, on 18 June 2019, the MP posted a tweet which showed how little is needed in order to stir the Macedonian public. The Miloshoski’s tweet has 41 retweets and 81 likes, but a greater damage was done when the media begun to publish the news.
The portal Vecher was the first one to transmit this post, followed by 32 other portals.
The news that 7 EU-members voted against awarding a negotiation date to North Macedonia and Albania reached much larger number of readers. On the following chart you can see how a fake news emerging from the social media, came back again to the social media through the portals, but in a much greater scope.
The portal who has the largest number of shares on social media
The analysis showed that markukule.mk is the portal from which this news has been shared the most – on 15 Facebook groups with a total of 856,871 followers. The news reached to potential 17,137-55,696 followers/users of social media. (Please see the note at the end of the text about the Facebook algorithm for calculating the reach)
The portal with the biggest potential reach, according to the number of followers of the Facebook pages on which this news has been shared
In this category, Kurir is at the first place according to the total number of followers of the Facebook pages on which this news has been shared – 1,086,688. The news reached to potential 21,733-70,634 followers/users of social media. (Please see the note at the end of the text about the Facebook algorithm for calculating the reach)
One curiosity for Kurir is that the sharing of this news has been orchestrated/automated, i.e. it was shared on 7 Facebook groups at the same time, 19 June, at 9:58.
The portal with the highest number of interactions from shares on social media
The share of the news by Infomax caused the highest number of interactions. Even though it was shared only on the Facebook/Twitter profiles of Infomax and has 186 interactions, the total number of followers of the Facebook/Twitter profiles of Infomax is 116,028, and by that this news reached to 2,320-7,541 users. (Please see the note at the end of the text about the Facebook algorithm for calculating the reach)
The profile/person who is the source of this disinformation has 7,803 followers and 130 interactions on the tweet. This means that this tweet has limited scope that does not go beyond the twitter community.
Creating news from such unchecked information (fake news), publishing it on these 33 portals and sharing it on 51 Facebook groups contributes to a maximal potential reach of 4,065,460 followers, i.e. – according to the Facebook algorithm explained below – from 81,309 to 264,254 reached users. The large number of interactions – 1,103 – means that the number of 81,309 users is the minimum that this news has reached. (CLICK ON THE GRAPH FOR A BETTER VIEW)
Note: The Facebook algorithm, i.e. the research related to organic reach gives a range of percentage from 2% (for groups with more than 500,000 followers) to 6.5% (for groups with less than 500,000 followers). For the purposes of this analysis the 2%-6.5% range was used. Taking into consideration how popular Facebook is in the Republic of North Macedonia, as well as the number of profiles on this social network, the percentage stated above is much closer to 6.5% than to the minimum 2%.
In order to determine the reach, the tool CrowdTangle has been used.
FINANCED BY
This project was funded in part through a U.S. Embassy grant. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the implementers/authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government.
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