What is it about?
Facebook has become an important platform for sharing news, particularly in the United States. However, there has also been a great deal of public concern about the spread of political misinformation on the platform, especially during elections. Some news pages on Facebook have a reputation for consistently low factualness in their reporting, and Facebook may allow their misinformation to reach large audiences. To study this question, we collected user engagement data for the 7.5M posts that 2,551 U.S. news publishers made on their pages during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Our results show that misinformation news sources receive widespread engagement on Facebook, accounting for 68.1 % of all engagement with far-right news providers, followed by 37.7 % on the far left. On average, misinformation news posts get six times the engagement of posts from more factual news sources, and individual posts from misinformation news providers receive consistently higher median engagement than non-misinformation in every partisanship group. While most prevalent on the far right, misinformation appears to be an issue across the political spectrum.
Featured Image
Photo by Roman Martyniuk on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Content from misinformation sources appears to have a distinct engagement advantage on Facebook. It is useful to understand this dynamic when attempting to mitigate the spread of misinformation.
Perspectives
Better understanding the out-engagement of content with misinformation sources on Facebook has been very important in my work of developing mitigations for the spread of viral misinformation. I hope this work can inform readers trying to understand the scope of the problems of mis-and dis-information online and speaks to the value of transparency on the part of social media companies.
LAURA EDELSON
New York University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Understanding engagement with U.S. (mis)information news sources on Facebook, November 2021, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3487552.3487859.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
