Now You See It, Now You Don't! A Study of Content Modification Behavior in Facebook

Social media, as a major platform to disseminate information, has changed the way users and communities contribute content. In this paper, we aim to study content modifications on public Facebook pages operated by news media, community groups, and bloggers. We also study the possible reasons behind them, and their effects on user interaction. We conducted a detailed study of Content Censorship (CC) and Content Edit (CE) in Facebook using a detailed longitudinal dataset consisting of 57 public Facebook pages over 3 weeks covering 145,955 posts and 9,379,200 comments. We detected many CC and CE activities between 28% and 56% of these pages (in both Facebook Posts and Comments). Manual judgements on these post/comment removals and edits show that majority of the content censorship is related to negative reports on events and personal grouses, and content edit is mainly performed to improve content quality and correctness. Furthermore, recency effect is also observed as part of Facebook content modification behavior.