A new study will show that misinformation on Facebook is much more engaging than news

The study looked at the Facebook pages of more than 2,500 news editors between August 2020 and January 2021. The researchers found that pages that posted more misinformation regularly received more reviews, distributions, and comments. This increased involvement has been seen across the political spectrum, but the study found that "right-wing publishers have a much greater inclination to share misleading information than publishers in other political categories," according to The Washington Post.

Researchers will share the study as part of the November 2021 Internet Measurement Conference. But it could be released before that, says researcher Laura Edelson for The Verge.

FACEBOOK SAYS THAT JUST LOOKING AT THE ENGAGEMENT DOESN'T TELL THE WHOLE STORY

A Facebook spokesman told the Post that the study was only about engagement and not "enough" - which is the term the company uses to describe how many people see content on Facebook, regardless of whether they interact with it.

However, Facebook does not provide coverage to researchers. Instead, they and others who want to understand and quantify the problem of social media platform misinformation - including these researchers - have often turned to a tool called CrowdTangle, owned by Facebook.

But in August, Facebook cut off this group of researchers from accessing that data (as well as the political ad library on the platform). Facebook has said that continuing to grant third-party researchers access to data could violate a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission following the Cambridge Analytica scandal - a statement the FTC said was "inaccurate".

CrowdTangle is the tool that New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose used to make regular lists of posts that got the most engagement on Facebook - a practice that would have upset the company's top employees because the lists were regularly dominated by right-wing pages that post a lot of misinformation.

In an effort to combat claims that misinformation is a problem on Facebook, the company released a "transparency report" in August that featured the most viewed posts on the platform in the second quarter of the year, from April to June. Only a few days later, however, the New York Times revealed that Facebook first abandoned plans to publish a report on the first quarter, as the most viewed post between January and March was an article that linked the vaccine incorrectly. Florida coronavirus of death - a post that has been used by many right-wing pages to sow doubts about the effectiveness of vaccines.