Political content makes up about 6 percent of what people see on Facebook and even Halloween had twice the increase in posting on US Election Day (November 3) on the platform, the social networking giant has revealed.
Most of the content people see there, even in an election season, is not about politics. This includes posts from friends or from Pages, according to Alex Schultz, VP of Analytics, and Chief Marketing Officer.
“For example, Halloween had twice the increase in posting we saw on Election Day, even though Facebook prompted people at the top of their News Feed (a number of times) to post about voting,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.
Much of the public discussion around what performs best on Facebook focuses on posts from Pages with the most engagement and which also contain links to other content elsewhere.
“There has been a lot of interest in Facebook’s impact on civic discourse and reasonable requests for us to share more data so it can be studied more fully. We are partnering through the Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) project with a group of researchers from a number of preeminent universities,” Schultz said. Facebook hopes the first research papers will be published next year.
“Following Cambridge Analytica, it is clear how careful we need to be about partnering with researchers and giving them access to data,” the company said.
