The Guardian: Facebook’s only Dutch factchecker quits over political ad exemption. “Facebook’s only Dutch factchecker has quit over the social network’s refusal to allow them to highlight political lies as being false.”
The Next Web: Study shows social media echo chambers might actually be a good thing. “A group of researchers, as part of a social experiment, paid liberals and conservatives on Twitter to follow a bot for a month that tweeted political views from the other side. Shockingly, rather than softening their own views or learning to understand the opposition, most participants dug in deeper. We’re not partisan out of ignorance, it seems, but because we fundamentally disagree.”
Nieman Lab: Has Facebook’s algorithm change hurt hyperpartisan sites? According to this data, nope. “An ongoing engagement. It seems as if Facebook’s algorithm changes — which deprioritize publisher content in News Feed in favor of content from family and friends, and are supposed to favor trusted news sources over untrusted ones — would result in decreased traffic for hyperpartisan sites. But so far, data provided to Nieman Lab by NewsWhip suggests, hyperpartisan sites — as well as two totally-just-fake-news sites — are doing as well or better on Facebook, at least when it comes to engagement, as they were before the changes.”
BuzzFeed: Inside The Partisan Fight For Your News Feed. “The most comprehensive study to date of the growing universe of partisan websites and Facebook pages about US politics reveals that in 2016 alone at least 187 new websites launched, and that the candidacy and election of Donald Trump has unleashed a golden age of aggressive, divisive political content that reaches a massive amount of people on Facebook.”
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