Abstract
Commercially motivated junk news–i.e. money-driven, highly shareable clickbait with low journalistic production standards–constitutes a vast and largely unexplored news media ecosystem. Using publicly available Facebook data, we compared the reach of junk news on Facebook pages in the Netherlands to the reach of Dutch mainstream news on Facebook. During the period 2013–2017 the total number of user interactions with junk news significantly exceeded that with mainstream news. Over 5 Million of the 10 Million Dutch Facebook users have interacted with a junk news post at least once. Junk news Facebook pages also had a significantly stronger increase in the number of user interactions over time than mainstream news. Since the beginning of 2016 the average number of user interactions per junk news post has consistently exceeded the average number of user interactions per mainstream news post.
Highlights
Social media and Facebook in particular have become a major gateway to news
We found that the user engagement with both types of news is growing over time, but the engagement with junk news grows faster: the slope of the trend line for reactions on junk news posts is 7.55 compared to 3.99 for mainstream news
We studied the reach of commercial junk news on Facebook, by analysing 117 thousand posts published by 63 junk news pages and 20 mainstream news pages in the Netherlands
Summary
Social media and Facebook in particular have become a major gateway to news. Large numbers of people access news through social media, as shown by survey data from the Reuters Digital News Report [1]. The bulk of the production of the junk news pages that we include consists of low-quality, sensational content. They frequently publish fabricated–i.e. completely fake–news, but as Venturini [15] argues, diffusion is the purpose, not falsity: ‘ [. ‘Junk news’ is employed as a term by Oxford University’s project on Computational Propaganda [16] covering a wide range of news sources. Studying social media use during elections, the Computational Propaganda (ComProp) papers focus on politically themed and motivated social media messages The characteristics of these messages are partly similar to the Dutch source material we analysed. None of the web sites in our sample deceptively imitates a respectable news brand, so the category ‘forgery’ does not apply
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