Story at a glance
- A Media Matters study of transgender-related content on Facebook showed that right-leaning sources got more engagement than other sources.
- Facebook prioritizes posts that get “meaningful interactions” in its News Feed, meaning these posts are more likely to be seen by users.
- In recent weeks and months, the company has announced changes to what it prioritizes in its News Feed.
Over a decade since its launch, Facebook’s ever-changing algorithm remains elusive. But a new study found that right-leaning sources earned considerably higher engagement on transgender-related topics than all other sources combined.
Media Matters for America, a left-leaning nonprofit research center, studied 225 pieces of high-performing content on transgender topics with a combined total of nearly 66 million interactions on Facebook.
Of those interactions, 65.7 percent were with posts from right-leaning sources, compared to 15.4 percent from queer sources and 3.9 percent from left-leaning sources. Less than 20 percent of these interactions came from nonaligned or “other” sources. The Daily Wire and LifeSiteNews published more high-performing Facebook content about trans issues than any other outlets, the study found, and posts about trans athletes and medical care for trans folks, specifically trans youth, earned especially high engagement.
“Media Matters’ analysis of trans-related content shared on Facebook shows that those Americans are often getting biased, bigoted, and misinformative news,” the nonprofit said in a release. “This content directly harms public discourse and policy surrounding trans folks.”
CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has dropped bread crumbs over the years to demystify the social media platform’s inner workings, and the company is facing renewed criticism for its decisions regarding misinformation and hate content. But one thing users do know is that posts with more positive interactions – reactions, likes and comments – are prioritized on Facebook’s news feed.
“Today we use signals like how many people react to, comment on or share posts to determine how high they appear in News Feed,” Facebook said in 2018. “With this update, we will also prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people. To do this, we will predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about, and show these posts higher in feed.”
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But it’s not that simple.
Subsequent updates have also prioritized posts from family and friends on Facebook over businesses, meaning that Facebook isn’t necessarily elevating certain sources directly. And while a recent CrowdTangle analysis found that the top-performing Facebook link posts by U.S. pages were from right-leaning sources, a Facebook employee noted that CrowdTangle measures interactions, but not impressions, which is the number of people who see posts.
“While some link posts get a lot of interactions, likes or comments, this content is a tiny [percent] of what most people see on FB. News from these Pages don’t represent the most viewed news stories on FB, either,” said John Hegeman, Head of News Feed at Facebook, in posts on Twitter. “Pages in these lists see high engagement because followers, or those interacting [with] the posts, are passionate. But it shouldn’t be confused with what’s most popular.”
6/6 As you’ve noted, some authoritative sources on COVID information (ie UNICEF, AARP) get more amplification by us. We are removing them from this list since you did, but the fact remains that these posts still get high reach and would otherwise be included in the Top 10. pic.twitter.com/92dWtpKtii
— John Hegeman (@johnwhegeman) July 20, 2020
On June 30, Facebook announced that the News Feed would begin prioritizing original news content and stories with transparent authorship.
“Most of the news stories people see in News Feed are from sources they or their friends follow, and that won’t change. When multiple stories are shared by publishers and are available in a person’s News Feed, we will boost the more original one which will help it get more distribution,” the company said in a release.
EDITOR’S NOTE: A previous version of this story incorrectly cited a Chartbeat analysis. It has been edited to correctly cite a CrowdTangle analysis.
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