Widely Viewed Content Report, First Quarter 2022

Today, we’re publishing the Widely Viewed Content Report (WVCR) for the first quarter of 2022. This report highlights the most-viewed organic content in Feed in the US, including domains, links, Pages and posts. It includes content recommended by Facebook and excludes advertising content. See the full report and Companion Guide for more information. 

Updates and Enforcements

Based on feedback from several academic and civil society organizations, we are improving our link and domain data methodologies. Previously, we counted a link view as any time a post or video containing a link was viewed, even if the link was not front and center. However, the feedback from these organizations was that our data would be more meaningful if we only counted link or domain views that rendered a preview. Moving forward, links will need to render a preview in order to be counted as a view, as that more accurately represents what people are seeing. As part of the transition, the Q1 2022 report includes top viewed links using both our old and new methodologies. Starting next quarter, the WVCR will use only the new methodology.

In this report, there were pieces of content that have since been removed from Facebook for violating our policies of Inauthentic Behavior. The removed links were all from the same domain, and links to that domain are no longer allowed on Facebook. During the last reporting cycle, we took seriously the feedback criticizing our approach to disclosing additional details about the content removed from Facebook that appears in this report. We have updated our removal disclosure framework in the report and Companion Guide. We will aim to disclose as much information as possible about removed content, including Inauthentic Behavior, that appears in the report moving forward. However, in instances where disclosing specific details on removed content would cause harm to our community, we will err on the side of keeping the community safe. 

Some lower-quality posts ended up amongst our most viewed last quarter, although it is important to note that the top 20 links in this report represent only 0.03% of all Feed content views in the US during the quarter. The fourth URL in the report linked to a YouTube video of a panel discussion held by a U.S. Senator that was rated False by one of our fact-checking partners. When that happened, we took a number of steps to limit the reach of this link, including adding a warning screen that shared more information about the claim, showing a notification warning to someone when they try to share the link and reducing the distribution of the link in Feed. Our strategy mirrors the recommendations of experts and academics in this field: deeper investments in outreach by trusted organizations online, as well as fact-checking as a primary approach to misinformation, since removing certain false claims about COVID-19 can exacerbate feelings of distrust with authorities and further marginalize populations. And without these features, this link would likely have reached more people, and those who viewed it would not have seen additional information and context from the false fact check. 

Insights from the WVCR help inform how we update our existing policies and products, and develop new ones, to address harmful or otherwise objectionable content. For example, we’ve been testing new ways to reduce clickbait, engagement bait and spam. While we’re seeing improvements from these tests, we will need to continually evaluate and refine our approach before seeing consistent results. We’ll continue to test alternative solutions to reduce engagement bait, misinformation and content from Pages that repeatedly violate our Community Standards.

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