Public versus Less-Public News Engagement on Facebook: Patterns Across Bias and Reliability

TL;DR

This study compares public and private Facebook news engagement, revealing that only 31% of interactions occur publicly and that engagement patterns vary across news types, emphasizing the importance of analyzing both spaces for understanding news dissemination.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive comparison of public versus less-public news engagement on Facebook, highlighting differences in interaction patterns across news classes.

Findings

Only 31% of news interactions are in the public sphere.

Engagement patterns differ significantly between public and private spaces.

Private interactions often involve deeper user engagement.

Abstract

The rapid growth of social media as a news platform has raised significant concerns about the influence and societal impact of biased and unreliable news on these platforms. While much research has explored user engagement with news on platforms like Facebook, most studies have focused on publicly shared posts. This focus leaves an important question unanswered: how representative is the public sphere of Facebook's entire ecosystem? Specifically, how much of the interactions occur in less-public spaces, and do public engagement patterns for different news classes (e.g., reliable vs. unreliable) generalize to the broader Facebook ecosystem? This paper presents the first comprehensive comparison of interaction patterns between Facebook's more public sphere (referred to as public in paper) and the less public sphere (referred to as private). For the analysis, we first collect two complementary datasets: (1) aggregated interaction data for all Facebook posts (public + private) for 19,050 manually labeled news articles (225.3M user interactions), and (2) a subset containing only interactions with public posts (70.4M interactions). Then, through discussions and iterative feedback from the CrowdTangle team, we develop a robust method for fair comparison between these datasets. Our analysis reveals that only 31% of news interactions occur in the public sphere, with significant variations across news classes. Engagement patterns in less-public spaces often differ, with users, for example, engaging more deeply in private contexts. These findings highlight the need to examine both public and less-public engagement to fully understand news dissemination on Facebook. The observed differences hold important implications on content moderation, platform governance, and policymaking, contributing to healthier online discourse.