Ref. Ares(2021)7731651 - 14/12/2021
Meeting with Facebook’s representatives – CAB Breton
22/09/2021
A recent US study also indicates that people who get most of their news through
Facebook may be less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-194.
However, when in August Facebook shared a report on its most-viewed content on
the platform5, none of the top 10 content was divisive political content. The
Washington Post qualifies “the new report as part of a broader push by Facebook
to block or discredit independent research about harmful content on its platform,
offering its own carefully selected data and statistics instead”6.
Transparency and working with researchers
In early August 2021, Facebook cut access to New York University researchers
access to ad data7, citing privacy concerns. The project’s researchers have regularly
briefed staffers and lawmakers in the House and Senate and officials at agencies,
and the sudden move draw criticism even from the US Federal trade Commission.
At the end of August 2021, researchers at New York University and France’s
Université Grenoble Alpes found that from August 2020 to January 2021, articles
from known purveyors of misinformation received six times as many likes, shares,
and interactions as legitimate news articles8.
At the same time, reports emerged that many Facebook posts from the days before
and after the January 6 Capitol Hill riots in Washington are missing from
Crowdtangle9. After the Capitol Hill riots, the academics said they had planned to
analyse what type of content Facebook had removed related to the insurrection to
meet its content moderation policies, but they discovered that up to 30 percent of
the posts collected around the January 6 riots were missing compared to the
original Crowdtangle database.
This comes at a difficult time, where reports emerged that Facebook is dismantling
the team behind the Crowdtangle tool10.
On 3 March 2020, AlgorithmWatch launched a project to monitor Instagram’s
newsfeed algorithm. Volunteers could install a browser add-on that scraped their
4 https://osf io/uvqbs/
5 https //transparency.fb.com/data/widely-viewed-content-report/ Facebook opted to share four lists that included eclectic mixes of domains and content,
with viral animal memes, cooking pages, and sites hawking Christian merchandise crowding out big-name media publishers. Notably, its rankings were
drawn from the three-month period between April 1 and June 30, 2021, so they offer no insight into what was popular in the months preceding or
immediately following the 2020 election or the Jan. 6
6 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/18/facebook-most-viewed-content-report/
7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/05/technology-202-facebook-shuttered-crucial-tool-oversight-lawmakers-say-it-just-made-their-jobs-
harder/
8
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/03/facebook-misinformation-nyu-study/
9
https://www politico eu/article/facebook-crowdtangle-data-january-6-capitol-hill-riots-transparency/
10
https://www politico com/news/2020/10/26/censorship-conservatives-social-media-432643 “After an internal battle, the company is currently
dismantling the Crowdtangle team after researchers and journalists used the tool repeatedly to trace how far-right, extremist and false content circulated
widely across both Facebook and Instagram.”
4/5