70% of recommended comments on Facebook articles defend Russell Brand
Preliminary analysis shows majority of recommended comments on news articles posted on Facebook about Brand's alleged sexual assaults suspicious of accusations against him
1/After noticing many comments doubting the accusations against #RussellBrand, it made me wonder about soc media algorithms & misogyny. So I did an experiment. What I found was pretty disturbing ≈ 70% of highest ranked comments seemed suspicious about accusations against Brand
2/ I used Crowdtangle to download all the Facebook posts from verified news organisations reporting the #RussellBrand story. I then sorted them by the number of comments. I analysed the top 5 'most relevant' comments on the 25 most commented on posts.
3/ Approximately 74 of the 105 top 5 'most relevant' comments fell into one or more of the following categories
a) Solidarity with Brand
b) Charges are political because Brand challenges 'establishment'
c) Questioning the motives/actions of the victims
See some examples below
4/ The comments were on posts by a range of news organisations, including The Daily Mail, the Metro, the Sunday Times, The Independent, LadBible, GB News, The Mirror and the Telegraph. In this preliminary analysis it doesn't appear to matter what political leaning the outlet has
5/ The fact most of the outlets are British is probably because Brand is British and British outlets broke the story. Sidenote: Just because comments are most 'relevant' it does not mean people agree with them, yet this experiment is to see what comments are most visible
6/ While this is a formative analysis, I am fairly alarmed at several things
i) The amount of people that seem to be automatically suspicious of women who come forward as victims of sexual assault
ii) The fact such narratives dominate in the most highly ranked comments on FB
7/ iii) That people's distrust of the 'mainstream' media is frequently used as a justification to denounce any claims about Brand
While of course people are innocent until proven guilty, a key issue of sexual assault, especially against those in power, is the struggle by
8/ victims to be believed - even when good journalists have done substantial work to get those stories out. It saddens me that so many of the most salient comments on this story on Facebook are those that reinforce a distrust of women victims of sexual violence #RussellBrand
9/ That's all for now, but I'd like to expand on this, adding more thematic analysis to the highest ranked posts to establish a little more nuance.