Facebook really , really wants you to know that it is n’t the hub ofhate spoken language , divisiveness , and straight - upmisinformationyou might think it is . It wants you to know badly enough that on Wednesday , the companypublishedits first - ever report detailing what Facebook claims are the most - look at pages , military post , and domain that were apportion across the political program between this past April and June . And if you take Facebook ’s Son for it , Facebook looks pretty dear !
The report card , which you may check outhere , paints a very different picture than the many , many reports from independent researchers and reporters who have found that hyperpartisan content collect the most clicks on Facebook . The data these people used , for the most part , comes from CrowdTangle , an analytics pecker that Facebookbought outin 2016 to show publishers on the platform which posts earn the most involvement . And with every young paper , the resultant seemed to be the same . correct - fender outrageconsistently reignedthe most popular posts in the U.S. , with place from figures like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bonginoconsistently rankingas the ones Facebook users engage with the most .
The company has antecedently countered that Crowdtangle only demonstrate anarrow sliceof what the great unwashed are seeing on their Facebook feeds . Then they argued that pointagain . Andagain . Thenreports emergedthat Facebook had quietly begun gutting the Crowdtangle team , argue that the reputational harm being due to the tool was n’t worth the transparentness it offered . That brings us to the new report , which the companypromiseswill show skeptic what content actually reaches the most people on the chopine , instead of measuring what fetch the most like or whatever .
Photo: Olivier Douliery (Getty Images)
That content , manifestly , includesdebatesabout whether lettuce should go in spaghetti , atutorialon build up your own swimming pool from scratch , and a stock photo of awrinkly baby bulldog . The most popular connexion being seen on the political platform , Facebook said , was toa sitefor Green Bay Packers alumni connexion , which it says gather eyeballs from 87.2 million users . Number two on the list was a link toa storefrontfor CBD products ( 72.1 million ) , and phone number five wasa shopfor Christian - theme thyroxin - shirt ( 51.6 million )
This sure as shooting is n’t the first sentence that Facebook ’s tried tocounter argumentsthat its site run users into polarizing political rabbitholes , and it wo n’t be the last . In the announcement , the company notice that it would let go similar reports on “ widely consider message ” on a quarterly basis .
In a call with reporters , Facebook ’s VP of Integrity , Guy Rosen , observe that “ there ’s a few gaps in the data that ’s being used today , and the narrative that has egress is quite just wrong . ”
“ CrowdTangle is focused on interaction . CrowdTangle only has a restrict set of certain pages , group , and accounts , ” he went on . “ We are create a report that provides a broad survey and [ … ] an exact mental representation of what hoi polloi ’s experiences actually are on our platform . ”
But for a reputation that ’s all about “ transparentness , ” the write up is shockingly un - gossamer . Facebook notes that its list of top - performing posts does n’t “ admit content which have been subsequently take down by the original substance Maker or by Facebook , or whose consultation has change . ” One of these posts — gather a describe 61.2 million views — ranked third on the list of most viewed posts .
The report also only search at a narrow slice of what most hoi polloi think of when they try “ Facebook content . ” It did n’t include the many , many advertizement littering the political platform , nor did it include any clips from Facebook Watch or any listings on Facebook Marketplace . rather , it focused rigorously on the content in people ’s Newsfeeds that were have the largest ploughshare of our eyeballs , and even that issue isan estimate . And even then , you postulate to take Facebook ’s word for these figure — and the party has provenmultipletimesthat it ’s not above parry figures to make itself look dear .
In other words , this report is just another attemptfrom Facebook to try out its transparence , while actually offering a wad of data that look like transparentness but is really just atomic number 59 . If the party really wants our trust , maybe it should offer us way to affirm these figures ourselves , instead of reading them secondhand from Facebook itself .
Ben ShapiroComputingFacebookSocial mediasoftware
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