Website Network Structure
The clusters of pages frequently reused a series of domains, with a total of 259 domains shared
between January and August 2020, some of them sharing hosting, registration, or analytics
indicating their shared ownership.
Each Facebook page primarily shared content from one website at a time, but some shared from
two or three. Studying their posts over multi-day periods a month at a time throughout 2020
showed that clusters of Facebook pages typically shared content from small clusters of websites,
and did not share from other websites at all at that time (although as noted below, pages did
sometimes switch their domains). The domains they posted can therefore be used to identify the
various distinct clusters of Facebook pages.
Domains Clustered via Mutual Page Shares
For example, looking at posts by all the pages in the takedown from February 1 - 4, 2020, a total of
104 domains were shared (not including links to Facebook itself). Far and away the most shared
domain was news.celehits.com with 1806 shares, followed by bahuthutagabar.net with 857
shares, thuta.org with 857 shares, razzwire.net with 490 shares, and thunkhuma.info with 412
shares.
Most of the shares of thuta.org came from just five pages: Crush On You, Shwe Wiki Myanmar,
Sica, Myanmar Hot News Agency, and Myanmarian. These pages shared thuta.org content in
99.2% of their posts. Similarly, virtually all the pages that shared news.celehits.com (12 in the
February dataset) shared this domain's content in 100% of their posts containing links. In yet
another cluster, the page Daily Myanmar shared 175 links (the most observed from a single page
during this period), all of which linked to shweman.website.
As the below figures illustrate, the content sharing strategy appears to have varied from one
cluster to the next. Some content was pushed by a larger number of pages fewer times, such as
news.celehits.com, and some by a smaller number of pages with more frequent posts. These
patterns varied slightly over time, with pages discontinuing posting links to certain domains and
posting other domains instead. Overall, however, most pages consistently shared the same
domains, or at least domains that could be proven to be connected in other ways such as shared
analytics, IP addresses, or registration, as seen below.
Expanding the analysis to the data from January to August 2020 showed similar patterns. The
top five most shared domains across the full set were themoonmm.club (6034 links),
bahuthutagabar.net (4910), celehits.com (3933), thuta.org (3117), and itechmedia.info (3093). A
similar focus on domains per page was also evident in the full data set; Let Pan - Daily News
shared letpandailynews.com 1034 times, making up 99.23% of all its shares. Thuta.org was
shared 789 times by Crush On You, Shwe Wiki Myanmar, and Myanmar Hot News Agency, each
counting for 99.87% of their shares.
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