Changing-Minds-Saving-Lives

Studying the ReOpen movement during quarantine on Facebook and the misinformation surrounding it.

We were taken aback by the ReOpen protests in response to the quarantine lockdown, on the urging of Boston University Professor Jeremy Menchik we decided to examine the national Facebook group : ReOpen USA 2020 and analyze the language being used and the type of information being shared via NLP tools.

The Facebook page can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/reopenusa2020/

Big thanks to Yelena Nevel(https://github.com/LenaNevel) and Cynthia Zhang(https://github.com/yjzhang3) for working tirelessly on this project. Yelena worked on the Scraper, Cleaning and the Topic Modelling aspects of the project. Cynthia Zhang worked on the Sentiment Analysis and Cleaning. I (Gowtham) worked on the Sentiment Analysis (Word2Vec), scraping, and the data cleaning.

We have included a word document summarizing our results as well!

You can find our GIFs for finding the Xpaths, Class IDs and the cleaned text in the .pkl format in this Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1E6pGEr6YetbuTS-kygNPLk_F0_NP-LR0?usp=sharing

Our demo is also located here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=10B0Rdkara8K3nv1lwUcDgHl2TMWZ3X8l

Ethical Disclaimer:

We understand that there is a concern for these users’ privacy, we respect everyone’s right to their data and private information. However, this is a public Facebook group and hence a public forum where people are sharing and posting content, therefore we are only curating their data and opinions for academic purposes and not collecting any personal information or revealing anyone’s identity/personal information.