YOU ARE NO LONGER ABLE TO DO THIS. Facebook removed Graph Search capabilities.
A few days ago I read an article from Ars Technica that the Whatcom County Sheriff’s dept. was seeking data surrounding the Bellingham #NoDAPL Coalition Facebook page.
The page, with more than 1,400 likes, provides information about pipeline environmental issues and is used to organize political protests and connect political activists.
In addition to demanding account information about those who have interacted with the group’s page, the warrant seeks “messages, photos, videos, wall posts, and location information” dating from February 4 to February 15.
Whether you are for or against the protest – I’m not here to argue. What I do want to show you in this simple exercise is how you can find similar data using Facebook Graph Search – namely – how to find who likes the page or any page for that matter.
Using Facebook Graph Search (the search box at the top of Facebook) you can search for people who like a page, work at a certain place, live in a certain location to name a few. For this exercise, I used “People who like Bellingham #NoDAPL Pipeline”. The search result showed no one liked the page, which is rather odd since clearly there are people who like the page. How can this be?
I looked to Google Search for an answer and found one with this post. The author shows to use the str command to be used with a Facebook page id.
My second Google Search was how to find a Facebook Page id. To find the Page id, in your browser, you right click on the Facebook page, on the menu that pops up, select View Source. Then select Control-F or Command-F if you’re on a Mac, a search box will appear in the upper right corner. Search for page_id. The long string of numbers next to page_id is the Facebook page id.
Now to put everything together.
“https://www.facebook.com/search/str/1078774875572313/likers/”
So in this query, I’ve inputted the str followed by the Bellingham #NoDAPL Pipeline page id, followed by likers. Copy and paste into the browser address bar and the Facebook result is everyone who follows that page.
The interesting thing to me is the text query in Facebook Graph Search “People who like Bellingham #NoDAPL Pipeline” is exactly the same in both results, however, the query URLs are vastly different, and one that actually does produce the desired result.
For an easier way to do these queries I highly recommend Intel Techniques website.
Watch the video demonstration
