Capstone-Project-Misinformation-and-Covid-19-in-Popular-Health-Websites

This case study investigates the web and social media content from three popular alternative health websites. All articles from 2020 were scraped from the three websites (mercola.com, childrenshealthdefense.org, and greendmedinfo.com) using rselenium and rvest. Twitter data was collected from Massmine and Facebook data was collected from CrowdTangle. All posts and text files were cleaned and text and sentiment analysis was performed on all content for comparison. Web traffic data was also acquired from Semrush and was analyzed for all three websites. Code and analysis is found in the Rmarkdown file and the accompanying functions file. Sample scrape files for the three websites are included. and a sample file for text cleaning is also attached. Additional scraping and data cleaning was performed for the datasets used in the final report. The PDF report shows the output of the rmarkdown with some revisions. Due to the size of the datafiles, these files are not posted but may be shared by request.