The influence of Facebook and its algorithm changes on journalism and fake news
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/Ambitos.2024.i63.06Keywords:
Facebook, Meta, Journalism, Algorithms, Fake News, Social Media, Political ManipulationAbstract
Facebook is the world’s largest social network (in 2023 it had 3.03 billion users). The algorithm that controls its News Feed - the publication feed - is one of the most relevant media formulas in the world. The research question of this paper attempts to answer whether there is a relationship between newspapers’ content decisions and the annual changes in Facebook’s algorithm. The first phase of this research consisted of mapping, for the first time, how Facebook repeatedly modified its algorithm with respect to the News Feed. A period of 11 years (from 2008 to 2019) was analyzed. Once each change was detected, these modifications were contrasted with data extracted from 122,869 publications of the 20 most important newspapers in Spain according to the EGM during those 11 years. The objective was to find the possible relationship between a change in the algorithm and a change in journalistic content. As a conclusion we showed that between 2008 and 2019 there were changes in how newspapers select content and correlate with changes in the algorithm. Another conclusion is that the modification of these algorithms influences politics and the creation of echo chambers that encourage fake news.
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