The Marketing of News Stories on Facebook
Facebook is an important source of news consumption for people all over the world. For news companies, the platform is therefore a major channel to market their content. News story posts are used to create traffic to the websites of media businesses, where clicks generate advertising revenue and subscription sales.
However, competition for attention is strong. On Facebook, the platform’s news feed algorithm helps users to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. It decides which news story posts reach the audience and which ones remain unnoticed. Media companies have been testing different ways to maximize the chances that their posts show up in people’s feeds, including clickbait: Curiosity-arousing headlines that have the sole purpose of creating clicks, such as You won’t believe what Elon Musk said today or These secret settings will speed up your phone by 300%.
Clickbait headlines may indeed catch the attention of readers, but the linked stories are hardly ever informative. In fact, clickbait often causes disappointment among readers. Thus, this kind of strategy to market content could cause could cause a loss of trust in media. Importantly, there is a risk of leaving citizens poorly informed or misinformed, which may be detrimental to democratic processes.
My co-author Ferenc Szucs and I believe it is important to better understand news consumption on social platforms, given the large role these platforms play for many people. We wanted to know more about the interplay between algorithmic content selection, the supply and marketing of news stories on social media, and the quality of news consumption. After all, these things may have severe repercussions on people’s everyday life, as the U.S. 2016 Presidential Elections or the Brexit referendum have shown, where Facebook allegedly played a crucial role.
We collected our own data to investigate these issues in this study. Specifically, Facebook’s “news quality initiative” that the platform conducted in 2013/2014 drew our attention. Part of this initiative was a major modification of the news feed algorithm designed to help users read more quality news stories, while curbing the proliferation of cat videos, memes, and clickbait. We thought this kind of modification must be a “game changer” for the media industry, and thus we wanted to know: How did news companies react to the update of the news feed algorithm?
Using a sample of 850,000 Facebook posts, our results show that news outlets responded by publishing fewer trivia and more hard news on the platform. In addition, the variety of political viewpoints increased after the modification. The ideological diversity of news stories rose — users might learn about the different angles of a topic, rather than just a one-sided take.
Facebook’s 2013/2014 news quality initiative and the corresponding modification of the news feed algorithm are a great example that profit seeking of social media must not conflict with society’s need for well-information citizens. As stated by Facebook, the update of its algorithm was motivated by new insights about user preferences. Internal surveys suggested that promoting journalistic content would increase user engagement (e.g., likes, shares, and comments), which helps Facebook maximize its revenues. But the promotion of quality news stories and curbing of clickbait were also beneficial for society at large, as the shift likely allowed voters to make better-informed decisions at the ballot box and hold elected representatives accountable.
We like to see more initiatives like this from social platforms. The issues created by Facebook and other platforms like it — such as filter bubbles, the dissemination of fake news, hate speech, and conspiracy theories — have real and far-reaching implications. For instance, the storming of the US Capitol in January 2021 illustrates that poor access to quality information may unsettle even formerly stable democracies.
