The proliferation of news on social media platforms has led to concerns about the impact of biased and unreliable information on public discourse. This study examines differences in interaction patterns between public and private sharing of news articles on Facebook, focusing on articles with varying bias and reliability, as well as the depth of interactions. To analyze these patterns, we employed two complementary data collection methods using the CrowdTangle browser extension. We collected interaction data across all Facebook posts (private + public) referencing a manually labeled collection of over 30K news articles, as well as interaction data on public posts posted in the forums tracked by CrowdTangle. Our empirical findings, backed by rigorous statistical analysis, reveal significant differences in interaction patterns between public and private sharing across different classes of news in terms of bias and reliability, highlighting the role of user preferences and privacy settings in shaping the spread of news articles. Notably, we find that irrespective of news class, users tend to engage more deeply in private discussions compared to public ones. Additionally, Facebook users engage more deeply with content from the Right-biased class, and exhibit higher deep interaction ratio levels with content from the Most-unreliable class. This study is the first to directly compare the dynamics of public and private sharing of news articles on Facebook, specifically examining the interactions and depth of engagement with articles of varying bias and reliability. By providing new insights and shedding light on these aspects, our findings have significant implications for understanding the influence of social media on shaping public discourse.

翻译：社交媒体平台上新闻的扩散引发了人们对偏见和不可靠信息影响公共话语的担忧。本研究考察了Facebook上新闻文章在公共与私人分享之间的互动模式差异，重点关注具有不同偏见与可信度的文章，以及互动的深度。为分析这些模式，我们采用两种互补的数据收集方法，借助CrowdTangle浏览器扩展。我们收集了所有引用手动标记的超过3万篇新闻文章的Facebook帖子（私人+公共）中的互动数据，以及CrowdTangle跟踪论坛中发布的公共帖子上的互动数据。我们的实证发现，经过严格的统计分析支持，揭示了在偏见与可信度方面不同类别的新闻在公共与私人分享之间互动模式的显著差异，凸显了用户偏好和隐私设置在塑造新闻文章传播中的作用。值得注意的是，我们发现无论新闻类别如何，用户倾向于在私人讨论中比在公共讨论中更深度地参与。此外，Facebook用户与右偏类别内容的互动更深，并表现出与最不可靠类别内容更高的深度互动比率。本研究首次直接比较了Facebook上新闻文章公共与私人分享的动态，具体检验了不同偏见与可信度文章的互动和参与深度。通过提供新见解并阐明这些方面，我们的发现对理解社交媒体在塑造公共话语方面的影响具有重要意义。