Here’s The Most Shared News Post On Facebook In 2020 (It’s Not What You Think)
KEY FACTS
Posted by Chicago television station Fox 32 in mid-January, the article covered a missing child alert for Brylee and Braylen Pate, 7-year-old sisters who live on the Florida Panhandle, and exhorted readers to “circulate their photos on Facebook.”
Fox 32’s post has earned about 3.48 million shares on Facebook according to data from CrowdTangle, making it the site’s top-performing link post, a category that includes most news articles but excludes photos, videos and other posts without links.
The post reached such a wide audience partly because users continued to circulate the article in public Facebook groups weeks after the incident, even though police found the two sisters safe just hours after the article was published.
TANGENT
Local police issued an alert for Brylee and Braylen Pate two days after they were reported missing, spurring Fox 32 and other outlets to run articles. Police asked residents to watch out for a car owned by a woman allegedly connected to their disappearance, and within hours, a Florida driver spotted the car with the two sisters inside, local news outlets reported. The sisters were safe, and the driver was arrested for interfering with child custody.
SURPRISING FACT
The 3.48 million figure only includes users who clicked “share” on Fox 32’s Facebook page, so the story likely earned even more shares from other pages that posted links to the same article. For that reason, other news articles on Facebook may have reached a larger total audience than Fox 32’s story if their links were widely posted on individual pages.
KEY BACKGROUND
Several other stories about missing children have gone viral on Facebook this year, drawing millions of shares from concerned users. Out of the 10 most shared U.S. link posts of the year, two are articles about missing children and seven are prayers or Bible verses. But on a typical day, the social network is flooded with politically focused posts and articles from national outlets. So far this month, Facebook’s five most widely shared link posts are a story about the death of actor Tommy Lister by TMZ, two prayer-of-the-day posts, an article about the Covid-19 relief package by conservative pundit Dan Bongino, and a link to White House advisor Peter Navarro’s debunked voter fraud report posted by President Donald Trump.
