The second post of this series showed an analysis of the data we gathered to document the biases of the Facebook news feed algorithm in the context of the upcoming Italian elections. In this post, we want to concentrate on a specific aspect, the fascist PoV, that revealed a disturbing trend.

(A quick summary of the project if you missed the first post: we created six Facebook bots, gave each political sympathies by making them “like” the Facebook pages of specific parties, and then let them scroll their news feeds for three weeks, recording what they saw. All six bots “followed” the same pages, but no two of them saw the same posts: the algorithm chose the “best” posts for each of them)

As the visualization below shows, Michele, the bot pretending to be a fascist, enjoyed a radically different news feed experience from the others: