345 15 2430 4 6472 document 2430 facebook-city-main.zip application/zip 4c93b8af4a82088172e4c92ae8c9110e MD5 26635343 2024-06-12 10:27:19 https://researchdata.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/345/1/facebook-city-main.zip 345 1 1 application/zip archive This repository contains the data and code associated with the paper titled "Facebook City: Place-named groups as urban communication infrastructure in Greater London". en public odc_by

facebook-city-main.zip

full_archive archive 162 disk0/00/00/03/45 2025-02-25 11:21:15 2026-04-14 11:12:24 2025-02-25 11:21:15 data_collection show Rodgers Scott Birkbeck, University of London ubmc002 0000-0002-1544-8743 Ballatore Andrea King's College London 0000-0003-3477-7654 McLoughlin Liam University of Liverpool 0000-0001-5285-7127 Moore Susan University College London 0000-0003-4771-2876 CACC mcs public Facebook groups, Greater London, digital platform infrastructure, spatial social media, urban communication, neighbourhood groups, communication geography This repository contains the data and code associated with the paper titled "Facebook City: Place-named groups as urban communication infrastructure in Greater London". This dataset was collected as part of the "Localising Content Governance in Place-named Facebook Groups" project, funded by Facebook Research. The main dataset is a TSV table containing place-named Facebook groups in Greater London, collected between 2020 and 2022. The data is also available in Excel format. The folder contains a data dictionary. This dataset was collected through web scraping from Google and manual searches on Facebook. 2024-06-12 Birkbeck College, University of London 10.18743/DATA.00000345 other Facebook Research Localizing Content Governance in Place-Named Facebook Groups 105497-10 yes 2025-02-25 bida metadata_and_data_files yes staff 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. Greater London, United Kingdom 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 2020-01-01 2022-12-31 https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/52683