Disinformation on Facebook – A case study from Finland ∗

The spread of disinformation in online media and its effects on politics has been a major issue of concern recently. In this paper, we look at the specific case of disinformation on Facebook, in Finland. We find that unlike the US, disinformation is not widespread in the Finnish media landscape. We analyze the differences in the reach and the social feedback for the disinformation content and the users who spread this content. We show that the top-100 biased articles are shared up to 2 times more than credible articles and have up to 1.7 times more reactions. Given that most large-scale analysis on the disinformation landscape to date has been US-centric and mostly on twitter, our findings provide a look into a less frequently studied landscape. Our results also highlight the importance of cultural differences while characterising the effects of disinformation. We release our code and dataset to promote further investigation into this area.