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Everything about this blog post is WILD. A short thread.
Apparently, according to Facebook's VP of analytics, only 6% of content on Facebook is political. If you’re wondering what “political” means, too bad!
No definition is offered.
(for more on this type of defining or lack thereof: https://twitter.com/ananny/status/1326383059588030465)
No definition is offered.
(for more on this type of defining or lack thereof: https://twitter.com/ananny/status/1326383059588030465)
This 6% number comes from “what people see in their newsfeed” and “This includes posts from friends or from Pages.”What about groups? The news tab? Facebook Watch? Since Facebook has been hawking all these products, it’s pretty harsh to now just ignore them...
As many point out, the post critiques the only widely available tool to analyze Facebook, CrowdTangle, to say that it doesn’t contain the data that we need to understand what is happening on Facebook.
Facebook owns CrowdTangle. 
https://twitter.com/emilybell/status/1326333394284929032
Facebook owns CrowdTangle. https://twitter.com/emilybell/status/1326333394284929032
Now, after saying that 6% of content on Facebook may be “political” this table of “Top US Pages by Reach” which has 8 non-“political” pages like The Dodo and AARP. (And two magicians???)
Anyway, this list of top 10 pages by reach STILL INCLUDES DONALD J. TRUMP and Fox News.
Anyway, this list of top 10 pages by reach STILL INCLUDES DONALD J. TRUMP and Fox News.
They apparently reached 22% and 19% of US WEEKLY ACTIVE USERS respectively. This is not contradictory to the idea that only 6% of what is on Facebook is “political” but it sure doesn’t make as strong a case as Alex thinks it does.
SO JUST TO BE CLEAR: The president of the United States who uses Facebook to actively undermine democracy reaches 1 in 5 weekly active users.
And this is apparently the most positive framing Facebook could come up with.
And this is apparently the most positive framing Facebook could come up with.
All of the above is concerning, and it’s wild that this is the best argument Facebook has to offer to say that it doesn’t have bias and isn’t as political as people say it is. The lack of transparency into any of this data, definitions of measure, etc is also deeply concerning.
All of this is to say that I’m very much looking forward to the research that comes out of the 2020 Election Research Project, lead by @TaliaStroud and @j_a_tucker and not anymore PR blog posts. https://medium.com/@2020_election_research_project/a-proposal-for-understanding-social-medias-impact-on-elections-4ca5b7aae10
