Facebook offers a distorted view of American news

IS FACEBOOK A right-wing echo chamber? No, says Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s 36-year-old founder. In an interview this week, Mr Zuckerberg insisted that this characterisation is “just wrong”. “That’s not actually how our systems work,” he said. But even if the social-media platform is not designed to amplify extreme views, it may still have that effect. According to CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that tracks how web content is shared on social media, the two most popular American media outlets on the site last month—as measured by shares, views, comments and other forms of “engagement”—were Fox News and Breitbart, two right-wing news sites.

An analysis by The Economist suggests that, whatever Facebook’s intentions, the social-networking site has more of a political slant than Mr Zuckerberg lets on. Using CrowdTangle, we compiled a list of the media outlets that received the most Facebook engagement in August. We then examined the top 35 for which data on their political biases were available from Ad Fontes Media, a media-watchdog organisation. All told, these sites received an average of 8.7m engagements in August. Fox News topped the list with 56.4m interactions in the month; MSNBC, a rival cable-news network, received just 9.7m. Combining these data with those from Ad Fontes—which scores outlets with a negative number if they lean left and a positive number if they lean right—we found that the 35 sites in our sample averaged a score of 6.0 when weighted by their level of engagement on Facebook, suggesting they skew right as a group.