74 © 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Content analysis methods for estimating the dynamics of facebook groups Rasa Kasperienė Faculty of humanities Vytautas Magnus univercity Kaunas, Lithuania rasa.kasperiene@gmail.com Tomas Krilavičius Faculty of informatics Vytautas Magnus univercity Kaunas, Lithuania tomas.krilavičius@vdu.lt Abstract— The relationship between the content that is generated by the users of social networks and their dynamics has been analyzed by many scholars. However, due to favorable data policies, the majority studies have been carried out by analyzing Twitter data. In addition, such research on Facebook (FB) groups (esp. political) is usually qualitative. The present study analyses the dynamics as well as topic dynamics of radical right political groups on FB by employing a quantitative research methodology. The current paper draws on a large data set that is comprised of posts from FB groups. Overall, there are 79 728 posts which are made up of more than 2 million words and were generated within the timespan ranging from 2010 to 2018. The experimental set up compares the general dynamics and the dynamics of activity on four topics in two radical right FB groups (i.e., pro-Russian and other radical right) in Lithuania. The results show that the year 2014 was important for the radical right FB groups in Lithuania. Newly created pro- Russian FB groups started growing rapidly, whereas the posting activity in other radical right FB groups started to decrease. The topic word Lithuania is relevant for the whole activity time when it comes to all the radical right FB groups. Such topic words as Russia and land correlate with national and international political crisis. Keywords—Facebook groups, radical right, groups dynamics, timestamp. I. INTRODUCTION In recent years, the European Union has been witnessing the growth of radical political communities throughout Europe, including Lithuania. Many European countries are witnessing elections in which people vote for far-right and nationalist parties, even though they are at the opposite ends of a wide political spectrum. The migrant crisis accelerated a backlash against the recent political balance, but the wave of discontent also taps into long-standing fears about globalization and dilution of national identity. The increase in the percentage of radical wing voters substantially surpasses the percentage of immigration inflow [1]. The political radicals are more avid and enthusiastic to adopt new technology and have thus found the virtual space to be a uniquely useful place [2]. Through membership in groups, one can define and confirm his/her values and beliefs through incoming information or discussion. When members of such groups face uncertain situations, they can gain reassuring information about their problems and find security in companionship [3]. It is also important to highlight the fact that social media provides fertile ground for the dissemination of propaganda and disinformation as well as the manipulation of people’s perceptions and beliefs [4]. Social networks can become a tool for manipulating the masses and fighting wars with little to no cost. The present paper proposes a framework for carrying out research on posts from Facebook (further FB) groups as a means to reveal information dissemination and group behavior patterns in communication by information transmission dynamics in groups. In particular, the aim of this study is to analyze the establishment of radical right FB groups in relation to the political events of the time as well as the dynamics of the most prominent themes by using the data retrieved from FB groups and R toolset. This article investigates the launch of Lithuanian radical right FB groups in a wider political context. It is important to understand the dynamics and the reasons behind the activity of such groups. Another important issue is to pinpoint when the topics discussed in the aforementioned FB groups become relevant and no longer relevant. Finding the answers to these questions can provide a deeper insight into the social processes of radical right groups on FB. Such social networks as FB and Twitter have become the most popular social networks in the world. In 2017, Twitter had more than 330 million active users, whereas FB had more than 2.13 billion monthly active users with a 14 per cent increase every year [5]. This giant flow of information has already shown to be useful for event detection [6], identifying public health issues [7], behavioral information propagation [1], community discovery [8], sentiment analysis [9], identification of communication roles [9], and recently as a means to aid political uprising [10] as well as a medium that can help to pinpoint and analyze the act of triggering an (upcoming) uprising [11]. II. DATA SET FB groups are the place for small group communication and for people to share their common interests and express their opinion. Such groups allow people to come together around a common cause, issue or activity in order to mobilize, express their objectives, discuss issues, post photos and share related content [12]. All FB groups have a title and a group description that indicate the common cause of group activity. FB groups can be public or closed. In the first scenario, every FB user can access group content. In the latter, content can be accessed only with a permission given by the group administrator. To comply with the ethical aspects of doing research, the present study only reports on data that has been retrieved from public FB groups. The data were downloaded by using the FB graph API [13]. The Graph API is created to get data into and out of the FB platform. This FB platform uses low-level HTTP-based API access that can only be obtained by a user who is