  Multiple studies in the past have analyzed the role and dynamics of the
Twitter social network during real world events. However, little work has
explored the content of other social media services, or compared content across
two networks during real world events. We believe that social media platforms
like Facebook also play a vital role in disseminating information on the
Internet during real world events. In this work, we study and characterize the
content posted on the world's biggest social network, Facebook, and present a
comparative analysis of Facebook and Twitter content posted during 16 real
world events. Contrary to existing notion that Facebook is used mostly as a
private network, our findings reveal that more than 30% of public content that
was present on Facebook during these events, was also present on Twitter. We
then performed qualitative analysis on the content spread by the most active
users during these events, and found that over 10% of the most active users on
both networks post spam content. We used stylometric features from Facebook
posts and tweet text to classify this spam content, and were able to achieve an
accuracy of over 99% for Facebook, and over 98% for Twitter. This work is aimed
at providing researchers with an overview of Facebook content during real world
events, and serve as basis for more in-depth exploration of its various aspects
like information quality, and credibility during real world events.
