Facebook: the evil world of correlating data

Is Facebook to blame for the attacks on refugees in Germany?

The study by Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz: Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime, Working Paper Series, University of Warwick No. 373 May 21, 2018 comes to the conclusion: “Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism between online hate speech and real-life violent crime.”
First, the authors equate the use of the AFD (Alternative für Deutschland) Facebook page with the use of all right-wing social media pages. “In our setting, the share of a municipality’s population that use the AfD Facebook page is an intuitive proxy for right-wing social media use.” The general local use of local media is identified with the use of the “Nutella” page: “We thus attempt to isolate the local component of social media usage that is uncorrelated with right-wing ideology by drawing on the number of users on the “Nutella Germany” page”.
Jonny Häusler sums up the result on WIRED: “The study comes to the conclusion that there was a significant increase in violence against fugitives in small and large, liberal and conservative, poorer and richer communities if the average Facebook use in these communities was above the national average. In short, “Those who are too much on Facebook become violent against fugitives.”
So by using the “Nutella” Facebook page, you become a beast? Extremely unlikely, but we don’t want to ironize the efforts. It’s difficult enough to investigate the impact of the Internet and social media. But it remains so: correlations do not prove causality. Thus economics professor Tyler Cowen draws a sober balance on MARGINAL REVOLUTION: “As it stands right now, you shouldn’t be latching on to the reported results from this paper.”

Analysis of the political Facebook discussion in Austria

“The digital report is a project designed to promote knowledge about digital topics. It was launched by Ingrid Brodnig as Austria’s Digital Champion, an independent function for promoting awareness of digitisation. The digital report provides data analysis, technical articles and teaching materials for teachers.” https://www.digitalreport.at/
This Austrian project analyzed the structure of the political discussion in Austria on Facebook using Facebook’s programming interface (API) and a Python script developed in-house, which is made available as open source at Github github.com/Digitalreport. See also the interesting methodological approaches “Luca Hammer: Data Analysis in the Age of Social Networks. How easy and yet difficult it is to create data analyses” https://www.digitalreport.at/datenanalyse-im-zeitalter-sozialer-netzwerke/
Apart from the Austrian peculiarities, it must be said:
“On the political Facebook pages, a minority dominates the discourse. One fifth of users write almost three quarters of all postings (73 percent)”.
In a separate article, the postings during the 2017 National Council election campaign will be analysed once again. A minority of extremely active users as well as automated entries are found. “Our research shows that there are other simple ways to manipulate political discourse. Numerous websites sell deceptively real fake fans with names and photos. People offer their real accounts in forums. For money, liken or comment on the desired page.”
An exemplary analysis that is clearly presented and graphically well prepared.