Running the networks

Mauricio and Bruno of Agência Pública, myself, and a few dozen lucky ones, spent a day, hosted by Facebook, tinkering away at The Next Cool Product, as part of a Facebook hackathon. As Facebook is hoping for others to solve their fake news problem, and as Brazil sees a new round of presidential elections next year, it’s no surprise these two subjects were getting a lot of attention.

The three of us, joined by four additional participants, decided to analyse data surrounding some of the upcoming presidential candidates.

Using an analytical tool Facebook recently purchased, CrowdTangle, “Corrida nas redes” continuously monitors popular Facebook posts related to a bunch of presidential candidates. Then, the links referenced in the posts are analysed for content against a bunch of popular topics. This is followed up by comparing the relative interest in each topic, per candidate, in relation to the overall attention each individual candidate is getting.

As a result, we show what topics are associated with each candidate, and, for each candidate, which topics dominate the discourse.

Taken offline in February 2018.

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