Fake News on Facebook

Across the political spectrum, Facebook users engage more with fake news than with accurate content. This analysis of three left-wing and three right-wing Facebook pages shows that average engagement figures (the mean sum of shares, reactions, and comments per post) are consistently highest for content that is mostly false. There was only one exception to this: Occupy Democrats, which although it did see higher engagement for content that was a mixture of true and false, it saw a drop in engagement for its mostly false content. We also analyzed three mainstream news sources (CNN, ABC Politics, and Politico); however, as none of these posted any content that was deemed mostly false, it was left out of this graphic (although, notably, they saw a rise in engagement for posts that contained a mixture of true and false information compared with mostly true content). This chart uses data provided by Buzzfeed, which rates the accuracy of all content posted by these nine pages over a week in September 2016 into three categories: posts containing information that is mostly true; posts containing information that is a mixture of true and false; and posts containing information that is mostly false.