Far-right news sources on Facebook more engaging
By: Cybersecurity For Democracy
Tags: Conspiracy Theories, Misinformation, Facebook, Far Right, News

Methodology

To study our research question — how users interact with news and information on Facebook — we obtained lists of U.S. news sources and their Facebook pages from NewsGuard and Media Bias Fact Check, two independent data providers that survey the news ecosystem and rate the political leaning and quality of media. In total, we were able to identify 2,973 news and information sources with both a political and quality evaluation from either NewsGuard or Media Bias Fact Check, as well as a Facebook page with an average of more than 100 followers.

We then downloaded all public posts between August 10th, 2020, and January 11th, 2021 from these Facebook and Instagram pages using Facebook’s CrowdTangle tool, a total of 8.6 million posts. From CrowdTangle, we collected data on how many users follow these pages, and how many likes, comments, or other interactions each of these pages’ public posts have garnered.

Engagement on Facebook and Instagram with far-right news sources was particularly pronounced on Election Day and again on January 6, the day of the U.S. Capitol riot.

Analysis reveals more engagement with extreme content

When we look at interactions per follower of a news page from the perspective of political leaning, we observe that content from sites rated as politically “extreme” tends to generate more interactions. This is consistent with findings from other researchers of social media in the 2020 elections. (Goldstein, The German Marshall Fund; Nilolav et al., Harvard Misinformation Review.)

Particularly, news sources rated as far-right generate the highest average of interactions per follower with their posts, followed by news outlets from the far-left, and then publications closer to the center of the political spectrum. To determine this, we added up all the interactions with posts from each political leaning and divided them by the sum of followers the respective pages had that week.

Far-right and Far-left news sources peaked on key dates; less intense for other news sites

Also worth noting is that engagement with posts from far-right news sources peaked both around Election Day and on January 6, the day of the certification of the electoral count, as well as the U.S. Capitol riot. For posts from all other news sources, the increase in engagement was much less intense. In the week of January 6th, for example, far-right news sources generated just over 500 interactions for every thousand followers of the page. Slightly-right or slightly-left news sources reached only around 150 interactions per thousand followers that week.

Far-right news sources suffer no “misinformation penalty”

Given the widely reported disinformation around election fraud in the lead-up to the election and the extremism that surfaced at the Capitol, we were concerned about news sources that spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. Both Media Bias Fact Check and NewsGuard sources evaluate, among other criteria, whether a news source is a consistent spreader of misinformation or conspiracy theories.

For far-right news sources, misinformation significantly outperforms non-misinformation; for all other political leanings, there is a misinformation penalty resulting in lower engagement per follower.

When we look only at the far-right, we see that misinformation sources significantly outperform non-misinformation sources: Far-right sources designated as spreaders of misinformation had an average of 426 interactions per thousand followers per week, while non-misinformation sources had an average of 259 weekly interactions per thousand followers. Being a consistent spreader of far-right misinformation appears to confer a significant advantage.

All other partisan categories, however, do incur what we call a misinformation penalty, although the penalty for slightly-right sources was very small. Center sources, for example, averaged 79 weekly interactions per thousand followers of non-misinformation pages compared to an average of 24 for misinformation sources; center misinformation sources performed about 70% worse than their non-misinformation counterparts. (We define misinformation penalty as a measurable decline in engagement for news sources that are unreliable.) Here, we note that many of the sources flagged as both ‘center’ and ‘misinformation’ are primarily focused on health topics and therefore do not fit neatly into a “right” and “left” ideological framework.

Directions for future research

These preliminary results raise some interesting questions for future work.

How do far-right news publishers manage to engage more with their readers, and why does the misinformation penalty not apply to that category?

We have to be careful about what these data do and don’t tell us. For example, we can’t say anything about how many people saw any of the posts we are examining. Facebook’s CrowdTangle provides researchers with information about engagement, reactions, shares, and comments, but not impressions — how many people actually saw a piece of content, spent time reading it, and so on.

Further research is needed to determine to what extent Facebook algorithms feed into this trend, for example, and to conduct analysis across other popular platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok. Without greater transparency and access to data, such research questions are out of reach.

Lastly, we looked at engagement relative to the pages’ follower base; higher relative engagement for far-right sites doesn’t imply that there’s more far-right content on Facebook, or that Facebook users prefer far-right content.

In conclusion, we found that far-right sources receive considerably more engagement per follower than pages with other political leanings. Furthermore, far-right misinformation sources are the only ones that engage better with their followers than non-misinformation sources of the same partisanship as an aggregate. We’re looking forward to learning more about the news ecosystem on Facebook so that we can start to better understand the whys, instead of just the whats.