Facebook: study, six times more interactions for fake news

Disinformation on Facebook receives six times more likes, shares and interactions than verified news.

This is what emerged from a joint research by New York University and the French University of Grenoble Alpes.

The study looked at the Facebook page posts of more than 2,500 news publishers from August 2020 to January 2021 and found that right-leaning sites have a much higher propensity to share misleading information than others. .

The researchers will share the paper as part of the Internet Measurement Conference from 2 to 4 November.

"This report primarily looks at how people interact with content, which is not to be confused with how many people actually see it on Facebook," said Facebook spokesperson Joe Osborne. , we would not have something comparable to the research on the sharing of hoaxes. "

According to Laura Edelson, one of the authors of the study, the work does not demonstrate that Facebook's algorithms favor certain pages or political parties "but disinformation - she explains - is amplified because it works well with those who surround themselves with users and content who post misleading news. in a regular manner ". In practice, a vicious circle is created from which it is difficult to escape. According to the research, among the far-right pages, those that spread fake news get 68% of all user interactions. The researchers used metrics from two nonprofits, NewsGuard and Media Bias / Fact Check which ranked thousands of pages based on political beliefs and propensity to spread untrustworthy news.