Here’s a look at Facebook’s data war

“Achieving the leaderboard is not a total victory from a communications standpoint,” Mr. Silverman wrote.

Mr. Schultz, chief marketing officer for Facebook, had the darkest take on CrowdTangle. He wrote that he believed that “the only way to avoid stories like this” would be for Facebook to post its own reports on the most popular content on its platform, rather than posting data through CrowdTangle.

“If we go the route of just offering more self-service data, in my opinion you will get different, exciting and negative stories,” he wrote.

Mr. Osborne, the Facebook spokesperson, said Mr. Schultz and other executives were discussing how to correct the misrepresentation of CrowdTangle’s data, not how to develop a strategy to kill the tool.

A few days after the November election, Mr. Schultz wrote an article for the company blog, titled “What Are People Really Seeing on Facebook in the United States?” He explained that if you ranked Facebook posts based on those with the most reach, rather than the most engagement – his preferred method of slicing up data – you’d end up with a more traditional source list and less strongly partisan.

“We think this paints a more complete picture than CrowdTangle data alone,” he wrote.

This may be true, but there’s a problem with audience data: most of it is inaccessible and cannot be verified or verified by outside people. We just have to believe that Facebook’s private data tells a very different story than the data it shares with the public.

Adjustment of variables

Mr. Zuckerberg is right about one thing: Facebook is not a gigantic right-wing echo chamber.

But it does contain a giant right-wing echo chamber – a sort of AM talk radio built into the heart of Facebook’s information ecosystem, with a hyper-engaged audience of loyal followers who enjoy liking, sharing, and clicking posts on Facebook’s pages. right, many of which have become good at serving Facebook-optimized outrage baits to a cohesive clip.

CrowdTangle data made this echo chamber easier for outsiders to see and quantify. But he didn’t create it, or give it the tools it needed to grow – Facebook did – and blaming a data tool for these disclosures makes no more sense than blaming a thermometer for bad weather.