Meta Releases New 'Widely Viewed Content' Report for Facebook, Which Continues to be a …

Safe to say that Meta’s efforts to refute the idea that Facebook amplifies divisive political content are not going exactly as it would have hoped. As a quick recap, last year, Facebook published its first ever ‘Widely Viewed Content’ report for Facebook, which it launched largely in response to this Twitter account, created by New York Times journalist Kevin Roose, which highlights the most popular Facebook posts every day, based on listings from Facebook’s own CrowdTangle monitoring platform. The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from:1. Occupy Democrats2. Ben Shapiro3. Occupy Democrats4. Ben Shapiro5. Ben Shapiro6. Bloomberg7. Occupy Democrats8. People9. VOA Burmese News10. Fox News— Facebook’s Top 10 (@FacebooksTop10) March 1, 2022 The listings are regularly dominated by right-wing spokespeople and Pages, which gives the impression that Facebook amplifies this type of content specifically, via its algorithms. Understandably, Facebook was unhappy with this characterization, so first, it disbanded the CrowdTangle team after a dispute over what content the app should display. Then it launched its own, more favorable report, based on more indicative data, according to its estimation, which it then vowed to share each quarter moving forward, as a transparency measure, Which sounds…
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