• by Colin Kirkland , May 30, 2024

Meta’s latest “Widely Viewed Content Report” for Facebook shows a shift in which domains, articles, posts and videos users are interacting with most on the tech giant’s original social-media platform.

Most obvious is the move away from in-feed political content, an obsession with Hollywood gossip and interest in videos that have since been removed. 

In general, during Q4 2023 in the U.S., the majority (62.7%) content views came from posts shared by people’s friends, from groups people had joined, and pages they followed, while content viewed on people’s feed consisted of 37.3% and 25.8% came from in-feed recommendations. 

The final 11.5% came from events and “logging discrepancies,” per Meta. 

In addition, the amount of referral traffic from Facebook has decreased, with 95.2% of the posts displayed in user feeds not including a link, compared to Meta’s first content report in Q3 2021 when 86.5% of posts in feeds did not include a link outside the app. 

With this in mind, the report shows what content Facebook’s user base is engaging with most, which unfortunately involves a lot of content, especially videos, that have since been removed or deactivated from the platform for violating Facebook’s content policies. 

Flanked by harmless Christmas and foodie content, seven of the top 20 most-viewed posts (or 35%) were removed, but only after millions of people interacted with it. Meta’s report states that “this video is temporarily unavailable” and doesn’t provide any understanding of how harmful the deactivated content actually was. 

As for widely viewed domains, YouTube took the top spot with 111.7 million views, followed by TikTok, GoFundMe and a plethora of gossip publications, like TMZ, People, ET Online etc. 

This theme overtakes the list of widely viewed links, with the top visited link of Q4 being a TMZ article covering the news of “Friends” star Matthew Perry’s death, followed by a New York Times article about Amazon president and CEO Jeff Bezos’ move from Seattle to Miami, a Today article about Martha Stewart’s wardrobe, and a Page Six article about Emily Blunt supposedly calling a waitress fat. The rest of the list is made up of similar celebrity gossip. 

Notably, none of the most-viewed links on Facebook during Q4 were overly political (the one Fox News link had to do with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Halloween costumes), marking a successful move away from the once-common proliferation of political content on Facebook. 

However, this may only be true for in-feed posts, as the report does not tackle what is being shared in more private areas of the platform, like in dedicated groups, begging the question of what is happening behind the scenes.