Reading this WaPo article on Facebook’s measures of page popularity made me uneasy:
We all know what kinds of posts we see when we open Facebook. But what is everyone else seeing in their personalized feeds? And just how much of it is divisive, misleading, or outright false?
Those questions have never had a definitive answer, partly because Facebook keeps secret much of the relevant data. Analytics tools such as Newswhip, which is independent, and CrowdTangle, which Facebook owns, provided windows into what’s trending on the social network. And a Twitter account called Facebook’s Top 10, run by New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose, drew on CrowdTangle’s data to produce weekly lists of top-performing U.S. Facebook pages — many of which turned out to be conservative or even right-wing political personalities. Meanwhile, Facebook has endured harsh criticism from President Biden and other officials who view it as teeming with conspiracies and misinformation.
Facebook has long argued such“top 10”lists present a skewed view of its platform, making conservative commentators such as Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and Franklin Graham seem more popular than they really are. But it struggled to back up its claims without offering more data of its own.
On Wednesday, the social giant announced that it will begin publishing a quarterly report of its own, called the “Widely Viewed Content Report,” that slices its data along new lines to produce a very different set of rankings. Instead of presenting Facebook as a hotbed of right-leaning politics, the company’s inaugural report presents a far weirder, messier, and spammier picture: the news feed as a junk-mail folder.
And then comes this:
“It’s like ExxonMobil releasing their own study on climate change,” said a former Facebook employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to a nondisparagement clause. “It’s something to counter the independent research and media coverage that tells a different story.”
Pravda. Pravda was, and is, the name of the lead political newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and was well known, during the Soviet era, for hardly ever telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Today it has faded into obscurity.
And that’s what Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and company may be practicing.
I have to wonder if this quarterly report is going to sink right into the ocean and be ignored, or if it’ll be picked apart by Facebook observers who find its results to be ridiculous.
