Facebook Releases Report On Most Viewed Posts In Q1 2021, What Are They?

Facebook, makes a report on the content that is viewed the most by its users. (photo: souvik banerjee/unsplash)

JAKARTA - Facebook finally released a report on Saturday, August 21 evening on the most viewed posts of the first quarter of 2021. This report was shelved because it made the social media company look bad.

As first reported by the New York Times, which obtained a copy of the Q1 report before Facebook released it, the most viewed link on Facebook between January and March this year was an updated story about the death of a Florida doctor possibly linked to a COVID-19 vaccine.

Facebook's policy communications manager Andy Stone tweeted on Saturday that the criticism Facebook received for not releasing the report was deemed "unfair," but tried to dismantle the complexities of how it handles the most viewed links:

“The news outlet wrote about a south Florida doctor who died. When the coroner released the cause of death, the Chicago Tribune added an update to the original story; The NYTimes doesn't. Is it right to delete the Times story because it is COVID misinformation?” that's the tweet from Andy Stone.

"Of course not. No one really suggested this and neither did I. But it illustrates how difficult it is to define misinformation."

We’ve been getting criticism for holding an internal report until it was more favorable for us and then releasing it. Getting criticism isn’t unfair. But it’s worth taking a closer look -- and making note of some of the components of the story.

— Andy Stone (@andymstone) August 21, 2021

Stone said Facebook had withheld the January-March report stating "because there are major improvements to the system that we want to make." They didn't elaborate further on what the fix was, but tweeted a link to the Q1 report.

What Facebook released on August 18 was a report showing the most viewed content in its public News Feed from April to June, the second quarter. This offers a brighter picture of the company; The most viewed post in Q2 is a word puzzle that invites users to choose the first three words they see.

The second most-viewed Facebook post between April and June asked users over 30 to post a photo of themselves if they looked young. The most viewed domains include YouTube, UNICEF, Spotify, and CBS News.

Among the top ten most viewed links on Facebook in Q2 were GIFs of kittens, and UNICEF's response page to the COVID-19 crisis in India.

It's not entirely clear why Facebook decided to release the popular content report, but criticism of the platform's handling of misleading COVID-19 information has increased in recent weeks.

President Joe Biden's administration has also urged Facebook and other social media platforms to do a better job of dealing with misleading or false information about the COVID-19 vaccine on their sites.

Another motivation for Facebook's new "transparency" report is likely the work of New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose who last year started using Facebook-owned content analytics platform CrowdTangle to compile and publish a daily list of the best-performing US Facebook pages.

These lists often include pages dedicated to former President Donald Trump, and far-right pundits such as Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino. The list has reportedly been a source of irritation for Facebook.