Meta’s second quarter «Widely Viewed Content» report for 2022 provided a look behind the strange curtain that is stuff shared on Facebook.
Considering how much pain and havoc the rise of TikTok has caused for Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, finding out that TikTok.com makes up some of the most viewed links and domains on Facebook is just adding salt to the wound. Ouch.
In its newly-released second quarter “Widely Viewed Content Report,” which focuses on U.S. content that appears in users’ feeds, Meta reported that TikTok.com—literally, just the link to the domain itself—accounted for 35.9 million views in users’ feeds. TikTok also made it into Facebook’s most widely viewed domains, where it took the fourth spot, garnering 108 million views.
Meta reported on four types of content in its report: domains, links, Facebook pages, and Facebook posts. Each type of content included a ranked list of the top 20 pieces of content in every category. This might seem like a lot, but the company states that the content in the report only represents 3.04% of what people see in their Facebook feeds. Meta maintains that the most common experience on the platform is for people to users to see posts without links from their friends or from groups they’ve joined.
It should be noted that the company did not include links and domains for Meta-owned domains in some sections, which means it’s unclear whether Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp content made it to the top of these lists. Considering how Instagram blows up my phone at every opportunity, I’d bet lots of precious coffee that Meta is pushing its own content.
As someone who tends to find very strange and corny content on Facebook the few times that I do open it, Meta’s report was fascinating to me. It provided a look behind the weird curtain of content that’s shared on Facebook and reinforced something I had suspected for a while: a good chunk of the content being viewed on Facebook is reposted stuff from somewhere else, yesterday’s tired memes.
