Facebook's 2018 algorithm change boosted local GOP groups, research finds
A change to Facebook’s recommendation system likely accounted for a disproportionate boost in visibility and engagement to conservative political groups on the
A change to Facebook’s recommendation system likely accounted for a disproportionate boost in visibility and engagement to conservative political groups on the social media platform starting in 2018, according to research published Wednesday.
The research, published in the journal Research & Politics, looked at posts from the pages of nearly every county party in the U.S. and found a marked increase in shares, comments and reactions to Republican posts.
Researchers at Miami University and Wright State University, both in Ohio, used CrowdTangle, a social media analysis tool owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to collect the data. They found that posts from local Democratic and Republican party pages generally had the same rate of interactions until 2018. By 2019, both parties were receiving more interactions, but a large gap formed. By July 2019, posts from local Republican parties were being shared more than three times as often as posts from local Democratic parties.
An author of the paper, Kevin Reuning, an assistant professor of political science at Miami University, pulled the data in 2020 for a different project. He said he initially didn’t understand the divergence in engagement. He said he considered that perhaps the Republican messages were just resonating more, but the same pattern wasn’t found on Twitter, and it was consistent on Facebook across over 1,000 Republican pages.
“When you’re talking about broad movement across hundreds of different vocal groups, you have to have something changing in the ecosystem,” he said. “When you take away those other possibilities, you’re left with this black box algorithm where no one really knows what gets shown and what doesn’t get shown and why.”
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