Academics and policymakers need a new CERN-like central facility to study the swirl of information and news circulating online, academics have argued, or democracy risks being eroded. Amateurish software engineering, a lack of long-term support for research infrastructure, and patchy access to tech platform data are leaving academics in the dark about what the explosion of social media content, podcasts and videos are doing to society and democracy.
Italy's media culture of sensationalist TV talkshows that invite pro-Russian guests to stir controversy is having an impact on public thinking about who is to blame for the war.
Every day, Media Matters uses Facebook's CrowdTangle tool to identify and share the 10 posts with the most interactions from top political and news-related Facebook pages. Our list also specifies the ideological leaning of each page. To capture the daily news cycle, each day's list covers posts made between 8 a.m. Eastern time the previous day and 8 a.m. Eastern time the day of posting. (Data for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday is aggregated and presented on Mondays.)
Publicly available data and reporting on Facebook engagement primarily focus on shared links. (New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose and professor Fabio Giglietto highlight the top-performing link posts on Twitter every day.) In addition to links, our analysis includes all text, photos, native videos, live videos, and YouTube videos shared by the most popular political and news-related pages. For a full explanation of how we developed ideological assignments for these pages, see the methodology