mw10104587 / ghost_boat_facebook_match

Ghost Boat Project - Facebook Name Matching

This is a sub-project started on 11/07/2015 in the workshop held by CUNY and Columbia University. Based on the assumption that people on the ghost ship know several of each others, probably they are friends on facebook. We try to compare names of some refugee's facebook friends to the manifest, hoping that we can find more facebook accounts of refugees.

This sub-project also aim to build a graph of the refugees, after we collected all of their friend lists. LOL

Directory Structure

• ---+--README.md
• ---+--python
  • +--FBFriendListExtractor.py
• ---+--raw
• ---+--csv
  • +--name_mapping.csv
  • +--given_names.csv

**FBFriendListExtractor.py:** - compares a person's facebook friends to the manifest and see whether there are similar names. - the main program that loads a html file in the raw folder, and outputs a txt file in the similar_names directory. - Use Levenshtein library to find similar strings.

How to execute

$python python/FBFriendListExtractor.py fb_id

**raw/:** - saves the html content copied by hand. - file has to be in the format [fb_id]_raw_friendlist.html
**name_mapping.csv:** - saves the mapping of the name between data on manifest, Facebook account name and Facebook id. - please input by hand. XDDD
**given_names.csv:** - save the manifest data

Goals

1. Compare friendlist of refugee and manifest list 2. Build refugee relationship graph - by getting everyone's facebook friends, we can build a relationship graph for the refugees on the ghost boat.

How To Get Friendlist

Without being authenticated by the user, we can't access the user's friendlist by using facebook api, so here we require some labor work. By going to the /friends of a facebook user, we can scroll all the way down, until they load all of its friends.


By right clicking on the last friend's name (anywhere in friends section), we can press the inspct element. Traverse it's parent element by pressing "left", until we find a div element with class="_5h60 _30f". Right click on this element and click copy, and paste it into note pad, sublime text or any text editing application. Save it as [FB-ID]_raw_friendlist.html into the raw directory.

// The way to get [FB-ID] can be learned by the following section.

How to Get Facebook User Id

For example, in the friends page of the user "Abel Ghebru", we have this url in our browser. > https://www.facebook.com/abel.ghebru/friends?ref=br_rs

by taking "barackobama" into this website

http://findmyfbid.com/

we can get facebook id

6815841748

**Contributor:** - Chi-An Wang - Mazin Sidahmed