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Cracking Open the News Feed: Exploring What U.S. Facebook Users See and Share with Large-Scale Platform Data
What kinds of information and disinformation do people actually see on their social media news feeds? Using data from the Social Science One partnership, we map out who shares which articles and how often.
Citation
Guess, Andrew M., Kevin Aslett, Joshua A. Tucker, Richard Bonneau, and Jonathan Nagler. “Cracking Open the News Feed.” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2021.006 (Original work published April 26, 2021)
Date Posted
Apr 26, 2021
Area of Study
Tags
Abstract
In this study, we analyze for the first time newly available engagement data covering millions of web links shared on Facebook to describe how and by which categories of U.S. users different types of news are seen and shared on the platform. We focus on articles from low-credibility news publishers, credible news sources, purveyors of clickbait, and news specifically about politics, which we identify through a combination of curated lists and supervised classifiers. Our results support recent findings that more fake news is shared by older users and conservatives and that both viewing and sharing patterns suggest a preference for ideologically congenial misinformation. We also find that fake news articles related to politics are more popular among older Americans than other types, while the youngest users share relatively more articles with clickbait headlines. Across the platform, however, articles from credible news sources are shared over 5.5 times more often and viewed over 7.5 times more often than articles from low-credibility sources. These findings offer important context for researchers studying the spread and consumption of information — including misinformation — on social media.
Background
Intense scholarly and popular interest has focused on the kinds of information — and misinformation — people encounter on their social news feeds, and where it comes from, since the rise of so-called “fake news” outlets on social media was linked to populist political victories, including that of Donald Trump. The stakes are high: If misleading and inflammatory content is widespread, social media present a challenge for democracies that both rely on informed debate and seek to protect free expression. Despite this, key questions remain about the proliferation of untrustworthy content on social media. While much research to date has focused on individual-level exposure and engagement with “fake” or misleading content, the question remains: What are the boundaries between “fake news” and adjacent categories?
Study
To answer this question, we take the “Condor” dataset and analyze how different types of news are seen and shared on Facebook. This is made possible by newly available engagement data from the Social Science One partnership, which covers millions of web links shared by U.S. users. For the purposes of our study, we focus on articles from low-credibility news publishers, credible news sources, purveyors of clickbait, and news specifically concerned with politics.
Results
Our results support recent findings that older users and conservatives share more fake news, and that both viewing and sharing patterns suggest a preference for misinformation that agrees with users’ existing ideologies. We also find that “fake news” articles related to politics are more popular among older Americans than other types, while younger users share more articles with clickbait headlines. Articles from credible news sources are shared over 5.5 times more often and viewed over 7.5 times more often across Facebook than articles from low-credibility sources. These findings offer important context for researchers studying the spread and consumption of information — including misinformation — on social media.