Dubious Studies And Easy Headlines: No, A New Report Does Not Clearly Show Facebook Leads To Hate Crimes

Overhype

from the it-ain't-that-simple dept

You may have seen a big story from the NY Times making the rounds this week, entitled Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests. For fairly obvious reasons, lots of people are interested in this story. There’s plenty of concern lately about how social media is impacting our lives, and clear evidence of it leading to attacks on refugees would certainly be useful. The NY Times, in ways that the NY Times does best, is somewhat breathless in propping up the claims in the report.

One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community ? big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold ? suggesting that the link applies universally.

Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.

Nationwide, the researchers estimated in an interview, this effect drove one-tenth of all anti-refugee violence.

The uptick in violence did not correlate with general web use or other related factors; this was not about the internet as an open platform for mobilization or communication. It was particular to Facebook.

Those are some fairly bold claims, and certainly worth exploring. However, it’s not exactly clear that the paper actually can support such claims. You can download a copy of the 75 page paper yourself, entitled Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime by two PhD students, Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz, both from the University of Warwick. For what it’s worth, people have pointed out that this paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and an earlier version of this paper got some less breathless press coverage a few months ago. But, the NY Times is the NY Times.

The paper definitely presents some interesting data, and it should be applauded that researchers are exploring these issues — though separating out the actual causal variables seems like a difficult task. The researchers do appear to have fairly thorough data on anti-refugee attacks throughout Germany. The Facebook data, however, seems a lot less solid. A few people have been breaking down the problems with the study online, including Jonas Kaiser, Dean Eckles and Hal Hodson, who all convincingly argue that the NY Times is overplaying what the study actually shows.

Before I dig in a bit, I should note that part of the problem here is that the necessary Facebook data to do this kind of study is hard to come by. Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it would be giving some academics access to data in order to do just this kind of research (though more focused on election impact, but this should be similar). And, it would be damn helpful if Facebook were willing to give out the kind of data needed in order to actually do the kind of study that was presented in this paper.

But, so far, it has not. And that meant these two students had to try to create proxies. And… there are some questions about how they did that. To be fair, the researchers do try a variety of methods and use a variety of tools to see if they can tease out problems with their data or alternative variables that may be driving the results — and thus the research is not just cherry picking data points. However, it does rely on a some fundamental assumptions, and those assumptions may not be valid. Specifically, in an attempt to measure “anti-refugee hate speech,” they focus on one particular page: that of the relatively new, extreme anti-refugee political party Alternative for Germany, referred to as AfD.

We create a measure for the salience of anti-refugee hate speech on social media based on the Facebook page of the “Alternative für Deutschland” (Alternative for Germany, AfD hereafter), a relatively new right-wing party that became the third-strongest faction in the German parliament following the 2017 federal election. The AfD has positioned itself as an anti-refugee and anti-immigration party; with more than 300,000 likes, it also has more followers than any other German party on Facebook (see Appendix A for a history of the AfD). This widespread reach makes the AfD’s Facebook page uniquely suited to measure anti-refugee sentiment on social media.

[….]

We measure the exposure of a municipality to Germany-wide anti-refugee sentiment using the share of the population that is active on the AfD Facebook page. Using this proxy for social media usage, we found that anti-refugee hate crimes disproportionally increase in areas with higher Facebook usage during periods of high anti-refugee salience. This effect is especially pronounced for violent incidents against refugees, such as arson and assault. Taken at face value, this suggests a role for social media in the transmission of online hate speech into violent crimes.

And then there’s… this. Rather than measure overall Facebook usage in Germany (again, here’s where Facebook could be of assistance), the researchers measured… Facebook likes of the “Nutella Germany” page (for what it’s worth, Kaiser claims there is no Nutella Germany page). Why Nutella? Your guess is as good as mine. The researchers sort of brush past why that’s the correct metric:

We further probe the social media channel in additional tests. We show that our results also hold for measures of general Facebook usage that are independent of support for the AfD. In particular, we create proxies for municipality-level Facebook usage by drawing on the number of users on the “Nutella Germany” page. With over 32 million likes, Nutella has one of the most popular Facebook pages in Germany and therefore provides a measure of general Facebook media use at the municipality level. We also use the Nutella data to create a dummy for municipalities with many Nutella users within a county. This measure is orthogonal to a plethora of observable characteristics, most importantly general internet usage, voting patterns, education, pull-factors” such as immigration and religious composition, and proxies of xenophobic attitudes. We show that municipalities with many Nutella users per capita also experience more anti-refugee incidents in times of high refugee salience on the AfD page { unless access to social media is disrupted by internet or Facebook outages.

There’s a lot of jargon in there, but one key point to pull out: the research shows that cities with more Nutella likers per capita experience more anti-refugee incidents. Right. So forget that they used AfD’s website as a proxy, and recognize that their study might also suggest that eating Nutella leads to anti-refugee violence and… it might call into question some of the usefulness of the study.

There are some other concerns as well. MIT professor and statistician Dean Eckles notes a huge red flag: all of the “robustness” checks in the paper support their thesis. He notes that a good research paper should include robustness tests that push the analysis past the breaking point to see where their theory breaks down. But that does not happen with this paper:

A separate issue is that the eye-opening stat that the NY Times provides is that line “wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.” However, a number of people are suggesting that this number is not correct and presented misleadingly. First, apparently while an earlier version of the paper had 50%, the latest version revised that down to 35%. That’s a pretty big difference — and one that the NY Times should correct. Second, the fact that the paper would shift so dramatically on that number between revisions also raises some red flags. Finally, as science writer Ferris Jabr points out in researching this number, there are a lot of assumptions built into this result, that are not necessarily well supported.

In short, there are a lot of concerns with the conclusions of the paper, and as there are huge questions about the assumptions used to make this point, as well as the potential quality of the overall paper, it seems absolutely crazy for the NY Times to run a big article suggesting that these results are solid, and without raising any of the concerns.

That’s not to say that a more thorough study wouldn’t find the same thing. It might. And, again, this is the kind of thing where it would be super helpful if Facebook were willing to release the necessary data, so no one would have to fiddle around with German Nutella fans. But, at the very least, we shouldn’t be going around making policy based on a draft paper that hasn’t carefully been vetted. And, yet, there are already some reports claiming that the German government is discussing this study, almost certainly based on the NY Times reporting, rather than a critical analysis of the study itself.

There are huge accusations in this study, and the NY Times has already stretched them much further than they probably should have been stretched — and without presenting much of the context or concerns about the assumptions. Before governments go rushing off to try to “do something” about this, perhaps we should take a step back and look for a bit more thorough and tested research.

Filed Under: germany, hate crimes, nutella, research, social media, statistics, studies, violence