Analysis finds that the 50 most viral fake news stories on Facebook in 2017 generated more shares, reactions, and comments than those of 2016
Craig Silverman / BuzzFeed : Tweets: @daviddeutschoxf , @anneapplebaum , @craigsilverman , and @craigsilverman See also Mediagazer Tweets: David Deutsch / @daviddeutschoxf : 9% more. Did the total traffic increase by less than that? http://twitter.com/... Anne Applebaum / @anneapplebaum : no, it's not getting better: the 50 most viral fake news stories of 2017 generated more total shares, reactions, and comments than the top 50 hoaxes of 2016 http://www.buzzfeed.com/... via @CraigSilverman Craig Silverman / @craigsilverman : NEW: In spite of Facebook's fact-checking and product efforts, we found that the top viral fake news of 2017 generated more engagement than last year: http://www.buzzfeed.com/... Craig Silverman / @craigsilverman : Total Facebook engagement generated by 50 big fake viral stories we analyzed in 2016: 21.5 million Total engagement for the top 50 of *2017*: 23.5 million Total Engagement for fact checks of the top 2017 viral hoaxes: 127,543 More data and analysis: http://www.buzzfeed.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Craig Silverman's year-end count extends his own [[a:877873|pre-election analysis showing the top 20 fake election stories out-engaged the top election stories from 19 major news outlets]] — but with a twist: a full year into Facebook's fact-checking partnerships and product fixes, the top 50 hoaxes still grew, from 21.5M to 23.5M total shares, reactions, and comments.
The number matters because it turns Facebook's own engagement metrics into a public scoreboard for its moderation effort, and it set up the follow-on research in this corpus: within months, a study found [[a:933446|Facebook engagement for sites identified as publishing fake news had dropped by more than half]] between the 2016 election and mid-2018, even as shares kept rising on Twitter.
First-order effects
- Facebook's fact-checking and product efforts are demonstrably failing to shrink the reach of its most viral hoaxes — the top 50 gained roughly 2M engagements year over year, handing critics like Anne Applebaum a concrete rebuttal to claims the problem was improving.
- Publishers of viral false stories captured more distribution and audience attention in 2017 than in 2016, directly at the expense of legitimate outlets competing for the same feed space.
Second-order effects
- Facebook faces pressure to move beyond flagging individual stories toward structural fixes — ranking demotions, publisher-level enforcement — because story-by-story fact-checking is visibly losing the volume race.
- The divergence flagged in later research, where fake-news engagement fell sharply on Facebook while Twitter shares kept climbing, points to enforcement simply displacing viral spread across platforms rather than eliminating demand.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform engagement counts become the standard external audit of moderation effectiveness — the approach later studies like Avaaz's, which exposed cracks, loopholes, and limitations in Facebook's systems, built on.
- Sustained evidence that moderation lags virality pushes misinformation from a PR problem toward a regulatory one, with governments increasingly inclined to treat engagement metrics as evidence of platform harm.
The trend: Platform anti-misinformation programs are being judged by third parties using the platforms' own engagement data, turning viral-fake rankings into a recurring accountability benchmark.