The reach of commercially motivated junk news on Facebook
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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. During the period 2013-2017 the total number of user interactions with junk news 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. Analyzing longitudinal publication activities, we found that junk news beats mainstream news in terms of publication activity. Publication activity for junk news has a larger increase over time, whereas publication activity for mainstream news stayed consistent. Junk news Facebook pages also became increasingly successful in generating user interactions: since the beginning of 2016 the average number of user interactions per junk news post consistently beats the average number of user interactions per mainstream news post.
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