![]() Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan recently argued that “likes,” comments, and shares are just a small part of what people actually see on Facebook, and that it’s difficult to draw conclusions from these interactions alone or to know what they might mean for an election. There’s now a running debate among academics, analytics experts, and observers like Roose around what we know about what’s happening on Facebook and why. While acknowledging its limitations, he’s floated that the engagement data can indicate what’s really “a rough gauge of what’s grabbing America’s attention” and serve as a “useful reality check for Democrats.” Essentially, Roose thinks this Facebook activity might be the “ silent majority” that’s more supportive of Trump than liberals would like. In July, he created a standalone Twitter account, called Facebook’s Top 10, devoted to these calculations, which now has over 16,000 followers (and copycat accounts that do the same roundup for posts in Italy and in Sweden). Meanwhile, Roose has doubled down on his analysis of what gets the most engagement on Facebook. ![]() This prompted several journalists to ask why Facebook won’t just make the type of data Hegeman cited publicly available. In late July, the head of Facebook’s News Feed, John Hegeman, chimed in, emphasizing that “these lists don’t represent what most people see” on Facebook, pointing to non-public data showing that the list of what’s most seen on Facebook tells a less partisan tale, with outlets like the Los Angeles Times and BuzzFeed capturing high amounts of attention. ![]() But the problem is, we don’t actually know if this is the case because engagement with public posts only measures one part of what users do on Facebook’s platform and can’t really reveal the extent of conservative influence there.Ĭritics have insisted that Roose’s numbers can’t tell the whole story. In fact, these numbers would make it seem that Facebook is almost entirely dominated by conservative voices. That seems to provide evidence against the notion that Facebook censors conservatives, a complaint often trotted out by Republicans despite lacking any significant data to support their claims of systemic bias. Consistently, Roose found, conservative pages were beating out liberals’ in making it into the day’s top 10 Facebook posts with links in the United States, based on engagement, like the number of reactions, comments, and shares the posts receive. There, he says he discovered what he calls a “ parallel media universe” where extreme right-wing pages reign supreme. “I was fascinated by how different the world that I was seeing on Twitter was from the one that the data showed was happening on Facebook.” I was just fascinated by it personally,” Roose told Recode. “I started collecting this data without any kind of agenda. Because Facebook does not offer much data about activity on its platform, Roose turned to a Facebook-owned tool called CrowdTangle, which lets journalists and researchers see which public posts are getting the highest levels of engagement. A few years ago, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose decided he wanted to get a better look at what was happening on Facebook. ![]()
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