You can’t even imagine how big Facebook is now. The network now has almost three billion users worldwide and more than half of them – this is almost unimaginable – use it every day. You don’t even want to imagine what all the people are doing there.
Ideally, however, all the time spent there would also be useful. What kind of knowledge about human nature could be gained from it? What kind of glimpses into the abysses and heights of our existence could the daily activity of the three billion provide? So many dreams, needs and sensitivities.
But because reality rarely has anything to do with the ideal state, it has always been difficult for independent observers to get an objective insight into what is happening on Facebook. You had to make do with special software tools that can be used to analyze what type of content users share and like most often. Commitment is what this industry means.
These independent statistics have shown time and time again that the highs are not that far off. People and content that are most frequently interacted with are overwhelmingly recruited from the right-wing conservative filter bubble. Reactionary agitators rank well above the so-called mainstream media.
Because they are reluctant to leave the suspicion of being nothing more than an echo chamber of the right on Facebook, the company is now publishing its own report every quarter. The so-called “Widely Viewed Content Report” is intended to provide a comprehensive picture of which content is really seen most frequently.
Facebook does not want to be analyzed independently – and blocks the access
Commentators rubbed their eyes in amazement after reading. On the one hand, because instead of the right-hand pages, only supposedly harmless domains such as YouTube, Amazon or even Unicef ranked at the top. The discrepancy is explained by the fact that Facebook uses other metrics, instead of engagement, according to the network, it is more about “reach”. The suspicion quickly arose that Facebook was turning things around as it seemed at the moment.
The ranking of the world’s most viewed links also came as a surprise. It contained nothing more than spam. Sometimes for a hemp mail order company, a leisurely recipe blog, for an arch-Christian clothing store or – at number one – for an obscure fan site of an American football team.
As if all of this wasn’t grotesque and strange enough anyway, the biggest laugh comes in the first sentence of the report. “Transparency is an important part of everything we do on Facebook,” it says. This is both funny and infamous because it is only recently that several scientists have had access to the analysis tools turned off. Initially, two researchers from New York University were affected, who wanted to investigate the connection between targeted advertisements and political radicalization of users. The private user accounts of the US scientists have also been deactivated.
On the Friday before last, the Algorithmwatch project, located in Berlin, caught it. Here one wanted, among other things in cooperation with the Süddeutsche Zeitungfind out, for example, the criteria according to which the sorting algorithm of the Facebook subsidiary Instagram displays and weights content to the users. Even before the first results were published, the network threatened legal action. Therefore, as the initiators now write, they had “decided to end the project and delete all data collected”.