Foreign Intervention Power BI analysis

Inspiration

The inspiration for the Foreign Interference Power BI analysis arose from the increasing concerns about the role of social media in shaping public opinion and the potential for foreign actors to influence narratives towards our community. The recent TikTok hearing event added a layer of relevance to the exploration of Chinese individuals and their online presence. This event prompted our team to delve deeper into understanding how influential Chinese individuals are on a global scale and how much influence they bring across the globe.

What it does

The Foreign Interference Power BI analysis is a comprehensive tool designed to: Identify Key Influencers and their Entity Owners: Dive into the dataset to identify Chinese individuals with significant follower counts on social media platforms. Additionally, explore the entities or organizations associated with these influencers to understand the potential types of content and narratives they are spreading through these accounts

Target Social Media Platforms: Focus the analysis on specific social media platforms where these influencers are active. Identify patterns of influence on platforms such as TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and others.

Focused Language and Demographics: Break down follower counts across different social media platforms to analyze the focused demographics and language of communication. This analysis provides valuable insights into the reach and influence of these individuals.

How we built it

Data Cleaning and Preprocessing : Cleaned the dataset to remove inconsistencies and irrelevant information, ensuring data accuracy.

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) : Conducted EDA to understand the distribution of follower counts, regions, and languages in the dataset.

Power BI Dashboard Creation : Utilized Power BI to create an interactive dashboard, integrating visuals such as maps, charts, and tables for a comprehensive analysis.

Challenges we ran into

Data Quality : Ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the dataset, especially when delving into entity ownership and content analysis, posed challenges that required careful validation.

Web Scraping Resistance: Faced challenges in implementing web scraping techniques due to specific restrictions imposed by social media platforms making it challenging to decipher the intricacies of the narratives being spread through these social media accounts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Interactive Dashboard: Created an interactive Power BI dashboard that facilitates dynamic exploration and understanding of the dataset, despite challenges in data collection.

In-depth Understanding: Achieved a deep understanding of the characteristics of influential individuals, their reach, and the regions they impact, even in the face of challenges posed by web scraping resistance

What we learned

What we have learned about Chinese government intervention: After this analysis, we have found out how serious the foreign intervention is to the English-speaking country. Those social media accounts with English content possess more than a million followers, which will significantly impact Anglosphere regions' political events, such as the presidential election.

What we have learned from this datathon: This Datathon has created an opportunity for us to explore more on Power BI and get in touch with the web scrapping technique. We have explored a lot of functions and visualizations in Power BI that enable us to elaborate data with a more suitable visualization. Although the result of our web scrapping tryout was not successful, we still gained a lot of knowledge of how web scrapping works and will be able to scrape the content from websites without restrictions on scrapping.

What's next for Foreign Intervention Power BI analysis

Deeper Entity Analysis: Continue to explore and validate entity ownership or affiliations associated with key influencers. Collaborate with domain experts to ensure accuracy and delve into the specifics of the narratives and content disseminated by these entities.

Enhanced Content Analysis: Despite challenges in web scraping, strive to enhance content analysis using alternative methods. Consider leveraging natural language processing (NLP) techniques to gain deeper insights into communication patterns, sentiment analysis, and potential narratives conveyed through social media content.

Dynamic Monitoring: Implement real-time or periodic updates to capture evolving social media dynamics, linguistic trends, and potential shifts in influence. This ensures that the analysis remains relevant and responsive to emerging patterns.

Built With

• powerbi