Exploring Facebook's News Landscape

Amidst the fallout of the 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, perhaps no company is seen with as much suspicion and (occasionally) frustration as Facebook. The social platform that started as a dorm-room hack has grown into a massively global corporation that has tentacles into almost all parts of our lives - whether at home, at school, at work or beyond.

Much of the recent discussion of Facebook involves news content on the platform, because the Facebook News Feed has increasingly become Americans' primary news consumption tool. A 2017 Pew survey found that 67 percent of U.S. adults get news on social media, and for ages 18-49 the figure is 78 percent.

Clearly, understanding what news people are receiving through News Feed is important for understanding news consumption today. However, Facebook has been less than forthcoming when explaining how the News Feed decides what to show people - only that the algorithm contains hundreds of inputs and changes frequently.

If one wants to understand the News Feed then, one has to reverse-engineer it to make guesses about how it works. For privacy purposes, it's difficult to obtain data about the behaviors of individual users and the content they consume, but it is possible to collect data about the behaviors of news pages on Facebook, which can shed slightly more light into the black box of News Feed.

Below, I do just that, using data from some of the largest news organizations' Facebook Pages, and an archive of their posts from March and April 2018.

The Pages

To start, let's compare the different Facebook pages included in the dataset, looking at the characteristics of their different audience interactions. Below, you'll find the average number of reactions, shares and comments on each post (controlled by the size of their total Facebook audience).

You may notice that Breitbart has a far more average engagement than others, across all three metrics - this could be due to their extremely dedicated audience, but it also might simply be because they have a more niche audience than other publications. Since they are an outlier in the data, use the toggle below the graphs to hide their result and focus on others.

Now, you might notice that NPR and Fox News have some of the highest compared to the others - and anecdotally, each has a very committed (and politically homogenous) audience. This may imply that more polarized news outlets - or at least ones with more polarized audiences - have better engagement than others, but this data isn't conclusive.

The Reactions

Many of the graphs from this dataset are based on Facebook's "reaction" emoji - icons labeled "like," "love," "wow," "haha," "sad" and "angry" that Facebook users use to respond to content. Different people use the emojis to carry slightly different meaning, but in aggregate some interesting trends emerge.

The reactions are a useful, if approximate, measure of the mood of any given article, since most people use each emoji for broadly similar meanings. This means we can compare the types of reactions between different categories of articles, to see which ones receive more "love" or more "angry" reactions, for example.

The graphs below do just that, measuring the total number of reactions for each category of news.

If you use the picker to select specific news sources, you'll notice that some audiences have a preference for specific types of content. For example, CNN's audience favors "love", while Breitbart's audience favors "haha" by a large margin.

Categories of News

The categories in this analysis are pulled from the news organizations themselves, so they're an imperfect but reasonably good measure of what a particular piece of news is about. It's important to examine the categories of news distributed on Facebook, to determine how the News Feed might be changing the types of news Americans consume on a regular basis.

Below, you'll find the most-posted categories for each page, which serves as some indication of what types of content that website is publishing on a whole.

The table below is a more detailed view of the same information, showing the category of post that received an interaction (whether that's commenting, sharing, or reacting) most often for that news site. For example, most of ABC News' posts are about national news, but their political coverage receives the most comments and "haha" reactions, while their lifestyle content receives more "heart" reactions.

If a newsroom is trying to optimize their social media feed to get as much engagement as possible, their entire row should be mostly the same color - which means their most-posted content is also their most-interacted.

Out of all of these reactions, the "share" is the most highly coveted by most pages, because it promotes their content to an entirely new audience and acts as an implicit endorsement of their brand. Therefore, each brand should pay close attention to their most-shared types of news (the second column) - and increase the amount of posts in that category if possible.

To better understand what causes a user to share, the below chart plots the number of reactions against the number of shares. While more reactions generally means more shares, for different types of content the two are related in different proportions.

The regression lines you see on the graph represent posts aggregated by their "top reaction" - that is, the most popular (non-like) emoji given to the post. If you use the picker to select a specific reaction, you can see all the points for that reaction on the scatterplot, which uses a logarithmic scale.

The top reaction is a somewhat useful measure to get an idea of a post's mood, and it seems to impact the relationship between reactions and sharing. For most pages the "angry" and "wow" reactions have the steepest slope, which means more people are likely to share a post when they feel angry or amazed, instead of just reacting to it. On the other hand, the "love" emoji usually has the lowest slope, which implies that people are more likely to "love" a post but not share it.

While this dataset is only a small slice that offers a fuzzy look into the dynamics of Facebook's algorithm, it is valuable simply because of how powerful a role News Feed plays in most people's lives. Further study into how Facebook affects our news consumption will be important to better understand what the nation is thinking, reading and talking about - and perhaps even offer a measure for the health of our news consumption as a whole.