![]() Up until those last three months of the campaign, the top election content from major outlets had easily outpaced that of fake election news on Facebook. For details on how we identified and analyzed the content, see the bottom of this post. (This analysis focused on the top performing link posts for both groups of publishers, and not on total site engagement on Facebook. Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. "If they just called it 'editor's picks,' there'd be no problem.In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.ĭuring these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. ![]() The mistake the Internet giant may have made, he said, is it wasn't forthright about how stories and topics make the list. Until he'd heard the allegations of misconduct, Kennedy assumed the list was controlled by an algorithm, like the "most e-mailed" list of stories showcased on many news sites. "With Facebook's trending stories, we had every right to think that this represented the wisdom of the crowd," said Dan Kennedy, an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University.įacebook's site even said as much, describing its trending topics list as "a list of topics and hashtags that have recently spiked in popularity on Facebook." The list is supposedly influenced by Pages you've liked, your location and what's trending across Facebook, but it doesn't say employees have a hand in selecting topics. Facebook's trending topics list was assumed to be a list of the most popular things on Facebook, they say, not a curated list of what Facebook's employees think is relevant. Journalism experts and media commentators are crying foul. But in a statement issued late Monday, Facebook vice president of search Tom Stocky said the company had "found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true." Some stories weren't allowed to appear in the list either, Gizmodo alleges, citing unnamed former news curators, including pieces about key conservative commentators and politicians such as Mitt Romney, the former Republican candidate for US president.įacebook said it takes the allegations "very seriously," and added it has "rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality." The company didn't have an immediate comment about Gizmodo's allegations. That meant stories from outlets like Breitbart News and The Washington Examiner were excluded or demoted in the trending topics list, in preference for more traditional publications like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Gizmodo claims that Facebook's "news curators," as they're called internally, were told to suppress news stories from politically conservative news outlets.
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