Abstract
On 11 January 2018 Facebook announced that its News Feed would favour "meaningful social interactions" between people and show less public content from pages, which it warned might see their reach fall. Internal documents later suggested that European parties felt the change pushed them towards more negative content. What happened to the engagement that party and leader pages received? I use 418,477 posts from 105 party pages and 71 party leaders' pages in 20 European countries, collected through CrowdTangle and covering March 2016 to December 2019. I compare each page with itself before and after the change, allowing for trends and election campaigns, and compare the break in January 2018 with breaks estimated in every other month. Around the change, I find no detectable break in engagement per post, total engagement or the number of posts: the median post drew about the same in 2018 as in 2017. What changed was the kind of engagement. The number of shares a page received rose by about 29%, while likes, comments and emoji reactions did not change, so shares rose from 14.2% to about 17% of all interactions. This break of 2.7 points is larger than the break estimated at any of 33 other months and absent in January 2017 and January 2019. The rise in sharing was found in 17 of 19 countries and was larger on the pages of populist parties. It lasted about a year and had faded by mid-2019. Larger pages lost engagement per post relative to smaller ones, and link and video posts lost ground relative to photos within the same page. The change did not reduce the engagement parties received, but for about a year their audiences shared their posts more.
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Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Shared More, Liked Less? Facebook's 2018 News Feed Change and the Pages of European Parties and Leaders. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23403682