Facebook City

Rodgers, Scott and Ballatore, Andrea and McLoughlin, Liam and Moore, Susan

Birkbeck Schools and Research Centres > School of Arts > Film, Media and Cultural Studies

Facebook groups, Greater London, digital platform infrastructure, spatial social media, urban communication, neighbourhood groups, communication geography

Excerpted from published paper:

Research design and methodology

The inception for this research was a related but smaller scale qualitative study of 12 purposefully-sampled place-named Greater London Facebook groups, focusing on the practices and perceptions of their administrators and moderators. To avoid selecting these 12 groups purely on our own preconceptions, we decided to generate a more comprehensive dataset of place-named Groups across Greater London. We quickly discovered that this task would be very challenging, involving both automated and laborious manual data collection and sorting. Yet we also concluded that undertaking this work could bring its own significant methodological, empirical, and conceptual insights into the relationship between Facebook and cities.

There is no simple list of groups by geographical area or spatial search facility on Facebook (or via analytics tools like CrowdTangle, owned by Meta), hence we had to devise a novel method to conduct the data collection. Our methodology to identify Facebook groups required four steps. First, we collected a gazetteer of 1279 London place names, which included the formal geographies of Greater London’s 33 local authorities and their 626 present-day wards, and 620 informal toponyms, mostly from OpenStreetMap (OSM), selected through the ‘place’ tag. Second, this gazetteer was used in September 2022 to automatically generate Google queries. This process identified about 14,300 unique public and private groups. A manual inspection of the data revealed a high prevalence of non-relevant results, especially from other geographical areas with place names of English origin. After determining that automated exclusion of these non-relevant groups was unviable, we resorted to a manual assessment, with two annotators resolving divergent classification cases, identifying 1398 relevant groups.

Our third step was to further assess our dataset of relevant groups via manual Facebook search queries, drawing a random sample of place names from our gazetteer. This revealed numerous London groups missing from Google results, leading us to undertake a further in-depth retrieval of groups by querying all gazetteer place names using Facebook’s search tool, and manually selecting relevant results. This added a further 1736 unique groups, for a total of 3134 relevant groups. Finally, we automatically collected attributes from these groups’ pages in September 2022, with 3016 groups active at the time of collection. We harvested only the following publicly-available metadata: group name; description; private or public status (split respectively at 50.7% and 49.3%); date of creation; ‘place’; member count; last month posts count; and average daily posts count. We did not collect personal data, such as user profiles or messages, thereby averting any breaches of privacy, data protection or informed consent.

Some redactions have been made from the main dataset. These are names, emails, telephone numbers and addresses relating to Facebook group administrators, moderators, founders, or others identified purely in connection with the Facebook group (e.g. photo/video contributors, other non-professional volunteers). Other names, emails, telephone numbers and addresses relating to businesses, governmental and non-governmental organisations, societies, celebrities, professionals, politicians, proprietors, and office holders have been retained in the dataset. The dataset has been assembled with reference to the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Ethical Guidelines 3.0: https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf