Facebook has released data for the first time on the number and type of posts that US users see in the News Feed. About 57 percent of posts seen by Americans in the previous quarter were shared by friends or followers.
The report looks back to the second quarter of this year. It states that about 33 percent of the posts Americans saw at the time were shared by groups or pages they themselves followed. According to Facebook, eight percent of Americans saw posts from sources they had no connection with during the previous quarter.
According to Facebook, 87 percent of the posts from the US News Feeds did not contain a link to another website, the remaining 13 percent did contain links to websites. Facebook has also collected the twenty domain names to which the most links were made. At the top of the list we see YouTube with 181.3 million views. Amazon is in second place with 134.6 million views. Unicef is in third place with 134.4 million views, while gofundme.com with 124.8 million and Twitter.com with 116.1 million claim fourth and fifth place. The company states that this group of twenty domain names was found in 1.9 percent of all posts viewed.
Facebook also collected the top 20 most viewed News Feed links that Americans saw in the past quarter. According to Facebook, these links make up 0.1 percent of the total supply from the American News Feed. In the first place is a website aimed at fans of the American football club Green Bay Packers.
According to the American website TechCrunch, Facebook wants to use this data to show that the platform is not inundated with political reports. But according to TechCrunch, it is difficult to reflect trends on the platform based on the data Facebook shares in the report. That’s what Kevin Roose, an American journalist for the New York Times, is trying to do with a Twitter account. The man then uses data from CrowdTangle, a data analysis platform of Facebook, to publish a daily top ten of the ‘best performing’ links on American Facebook pages.
Facebook recently stated that since the corona outbreak, it has removed more than 3,000 accounts, pages and groups from the platform that spread misinformation about the virus. In total, the company is also said to have deleted 20 million messages.