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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

The first couple paragraphs of the linked article lay out pretty clearly what they are hiding: the "facebooktop10" Twitter account publishes a list of the ten most shared posts every day, and it's always dominated by Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson.

Facebook doesn't want to be seen as a platform for sharing bigotry and misinformation, so they are releasing this report to counter the data aggregated by facebooktop10.

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That account posts the top 10 links shared and interacted with by (what it considers as) US pages which is quite different to the most seen by all users. As the report states pages (let alone just US pages) contribute less to what you see than either friends or groups.

I'd argue that pointing to what gets shared, rather than what reaches people and actually gets viewed, as proof that Facebook is a hotbed of right-wing content and that the idea they discriminate against it is a lie is actually outright misinformation. The thing Facebook's algorithms control is which widely-shared and widely-interacted content actually shows up in people's feeds, and if you ignore that you're ignoring Facebook as a company's entire role in influencing what their audience sees.

Pages can share whatever they want. I can create 5000 pages tomorrow to only share Colbert. That's something that Facebook has less control over than what gets seen, and is less relevant at that.

>The thing Facebook's algorithms control is which widely-shared and widely-interacted content

This disproves your point though. According to facebooktop10 most of what is shared is 'right-wing content' yet most of what people actually see isn't. So really, it does kind of look like they might 'discriminate' against right-wing content if they show it less despite being so widely shared.

Yes. That’s the point. They are publishing this list, because the other list makes them look like a cesspool of forwards-from-racist-grandpa and MAGA-chums.

Both lists are probably correct. (It’s not like—completely hypothetical—view counts of videos which are sort-of like the the double-slit experiment for Facebook.)

Which one is more meaningful? It probably wasn’t entirely accidental that they started with measuring engagement, and everything they (and others) do is intended to raise engagement.

The pivot to view counts is motivated only by their increasing fear of nor just increasing regulation. They are simply bleeding users, especially the most lucrative groups that are young, educated, and international, who are leaving the country club of social networks because they see these lists-even though their own feeds have maybe slowed down but not changed much otherwise.

Are they even losing users overall? This[0] suggests MAU is still increasing.

0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

By that measure, I haven’t changed my Facebook habits. But I’ve gone from an hour per day to checking it twice a month, as have many people I know.

BUT: I wouldn’t be surprised if there are difference between age groups, social classes, and regions of the globe, and that it may even be possible they are still growing their audience.

> As the report states pages (let alone just US pages) contribute less to what you see than either friends or groups.

Facebook wants to control the public narrative about Facebook, and the narrative that they want seen is that Facebook is a positive place to connect with friends and form communities and they're doing everything they can to keep it that way. There's enough data out there to call that narrative into question, and Facebook's doing what it can to limit "transparency" to a window that only shows what they want people to see.

IMHO, any report Facebook releases that supports their preferred narrative and disconfirms more critical ones is unbelievable unless accompanied by enough (verified) data that a skeptic can recreate their analysis and be satisfied. Otherwise, it's like deciding a trial based on only the defense's case.

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