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      The reach of commercially motivated junk news on Facebook

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          Abstract

          Commercially motivated junk news–i.e. money-driven, highly shareable clickbait with low journalistic production standards–constitutes a vast and largely unexplored news media ecosystem. Using publicly available Facebook data, we compared the reach of junk news on Facebook pages in the Netherlands to the reach of Dutch mainstream news on Facebook. During the period 2013–2017 the total number of user interactions with junk news significantly exceeded that with mainstream news. Over 5 Million of the 10 Million Dutch Facebook users have interacted with a junk news post at least once. Junk news Facebook pages also had a significantly stronger increase in the number of user interactions over time than mainstream news. Since the beginning of 2016 the average number of user interactions per junk news post has consistently exceeded the average number of user interactions per mainstream news post.

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          Most cited references15

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          The spread of true and false news online

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            Defining “Fake News”

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              Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – original draft
                Role: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: ResourcesRole: SoftwareRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draft
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: MethodologyRole: SupervisionRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                1 August 2019
                2019
                : 14
                : 8
                : e0220446
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Department of Journalism and New Media, Leiden University Centre of Linguistics (LUCL), Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands
                [2 ] Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands
                Universitá degli Studi di Milano, ITALY
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: Two authors, PB and AP, received payments from Facebook for their services as a third-party fact-checkers. This does not alter the authors' adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9609-9505
                Article
                PONE-D-18-36537
                10.1371/journal.pone.0220446
                6675076
                31369596
                ce7b4bc3-81af-4e64-a6d5-330fa27f7d12
                © 2019 Burger et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 21 December 2018
                : 15 July 2019
                Page count
                Figures: 4, Tables: 2, Pages: 15
                Funding
                From March 2017 through January 2018 Leiden University’s Nieuwscheckers project, supervised by authors PB and AP, received payments from Facebook for its services as a third-party fact-checker, publishing fact-checks of Facebook posts that were reported by users as potentially fake. The third-party fact-checkers have complete editorial independence, warranted by their adherence to the principles of the International Fact- Checking Network (IFCN). Burger and Pleijter did not receive payments from Facebook in order to fund this study, nor did Facebook have any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Communications
                Social Communication
                Social Media
                Facebook
                Computer and Information Sciences
                Network Analysis
                Social Networks
                Social Media
                Facebook
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Social Networks
                Social Media
                Facebook
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Communications
                Social Communication
                Social Media
                Computer and Information Sciences
                Network Analysis
                Social Networks
                Social Media
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Social Networks
                Social Media
                Social Sciences
                Political Science
                Elections
                People and places
                Geographical locations
                Europe
                European Union
                Netherlands
                People and places
                Geographical locations
                Europe
                European Union
                France
                People and places
                Geographical locations
                Europe
                European Union
                Italy
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Communications
                Social Communication
                Social Media
                Twitter
                Computer and Information Sciences
                Network Analysis
                Social Networks
                Social Media
                Twitter
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Social Networks
                Social Media
                Twitter
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Motivation
                Social Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Motivation
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Neuroscience
                Cognitive Science
                Cognitive Psychology
                Motivation
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Psychology
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                Social Sciences
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                Motivation
                Custom metadata
                The data underlying the results presented in the study are available from Facebook, through the Facebook Graph API, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/ Version 2.8 was accessed in the fall of 2017 for obtaining the first batch of data, and version 3.0 was accessed in the spring of 2018 for obtaining the second batch of data. The data that we obtain from the API is further specified in the section "Data download and processing" of the manuscript. We confirm that we as authors did not have any special access privileges that others would not have. The Facebook Graph API is open to everyone for data download.

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