Our analysis of Facebook's WVC Report for Q3 2022

Written By Jeff Allen

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Hello,

Facebook released the Q3 2022 edition of their Widely Viewed Content report before Thanksgiving, so it's bit late, but we've finished our analysis of the Q3 2022 Widely Viewed Content Report from Facebook.

Facebook celebrated that it was free of "low quality" content, but we found a few things to investigate in it, including...

1. We found a likely "traffic arbitrage" operation, which probably violates FB policy, and hides an article with very high ad load behind an no ad article using "cloaking"/"masking".

2. We checked in on the network of Groups behind previous inauthentic activity on the WVCR, and found them rebuilding their network with hacked accounts.

3. We investigated how Insider took 10 of the top 20 positions on the most viewed links. They have a network of Pages sharing links to articles that are fairly thin summaries of original reporting or original content from other outlets that previously went viral.

Read in detail here, or a summary on Mastodon here, or a summary on Twitter here!

Happy Holidays,

Jeff

Jeff Allen

Jeff Allen is the co-founder and chief research officer of the Integrity Institute. He was a data scientist at Facebook from 2016 to 2019. While at Facebook, he worked on tackling systemic issues in the public content ecosystems of Facebook and Instagram, developing strategies to ensure that the incentive structure that the platforms created for publishers was in alignment with Facebooks company mission statement.

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