Fun facts from the new Facebook filter bubble study

Summary

Facebook's recent study reveals insights into how political ideology affects content consumption and sharing on the platform, highlighting the filter bubble effect and differences in news engagement between liberals and conservatives.

Abstract

The study indicates that hard news shared on Facebook often aligns with extreme political views, either strongly liberal or conservative. The platform's algorithm contributes significantly to the filter bubble effect, though it is slightly more pronounced for liberals. Conservatives are less likely to engage with content that presents opposing views compared to liberals. Despite conservatives sharing more hard news content, liberal-oriented news tends to be more widely engaged with across the political spectrum. The study also notes that liberals have more Facebook friends on average and that the news feed algorithm ranks liberal-aligned content higher for conservatives than conservative content for liberals.

Opinions

The study suggests that Facebook's algorithm has a substantial impact on narrowing the scope of news content consumed by users, nearly as much as their personal choices in clicking on content.
There is a perception that conservative users are more insular in their news consumption, as evidenced by their lower engagement with opposing viewpoints.
The Washington Post is recognized for its broad appeal across the political spectrum, which is unusual compared to other major news outlets.
The data implies that liberal-aligned content may be more engaging or shareable, as indicated by its higher visibility in the news feeds of conservatives.
The study's findings on the visibility of cross-cutting content suggest that Facebook's algorithm may inadvertently favor liberal-aligned content, potentially due to the types of sources favored by liberals.
The difference in the number of friends between self-identified liberals and conservatives could reflect demographic differences or varying social behaviors on the platform.

Fun facts from the new Facebook filter bubble study

Facebook’s new study on the filter bubble has lots of interesting tidbits on how liberals and conservatives consume content on the platform. (My main take on what it all means is here.)

Here are a few of the most fascinating facts:

The hard news people share tends to either be favored by folks at the edges — strong liberals or conservatives:

The “filter bubble effect” — the degree to which Facebook’s algorithm narrows what content you consume — is almost as strong as your individual choices about what you click on.

The relative effect of the algorithm in filtering news is stronger for liberals than conservatives. For liberals, the effect of what you click is about 6%, whereas the algorithmic effect is 8%. For conservatives, the filter bubble effect is about 5% and the click effect is about 17%. (Table S6)

When presented with news that contains opposing views, conservatives click on it a lot less than liberals. (17% for conservatives vs. 6% for liberals)

Roughly 13% of all links posted on Facebook were “hard news”-oriented content. On average, viewers clicked on 7% of the hard news content available in their feeds.

The Washington Post does a remarkable job of being shared by folks across the political spectrum. While a majority of links from the Post are shared primarily by liberals, 43% of shares come from moderates and conservatives. No other site listed comes close to that kind of breadth.

According to the study, conservatives actually see more liberal-favored news on Facebook than liberals see conservative news. In general, 35% of the news seen by conservatives is favored by liberals, whereas only 24% of the news liberals see is favored by conservatives. This is a bit misleading, though, due to the way the articles were tagged — because liberals tend to favor large outfits with less of an ideological bent. (E.g. CNN, New York Times)

Self-labeled liberals have more friends on Facebook than self-labeled conservatives — 551 to 475 on average. (This is probably a function of demographics as much as anything.)

There are more conservative-aligned hard news shares than liberal-aligned hard news shares.

But it looks like liberal-aligned content may be more engaging than content that’s popular among conservatives — that’s my guess about what’s going on in this graph, which looks at how high in the News Feed cross-cutting content shows up for liberals and conservatives. As you can see, liberal-aligned content seems to be upranked more for conservatives than the reverse:

Eli Pariser is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You and the co-founder of Upworthy, a website dedicated to drawing attention to important social topics. He’s at @Elipariser on Twitter.