TY - JOUR AU - Roy, Jean-Hugues PY - 2022/07/04 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Kittens and Jesus: What would remain in a newsless Facebook? JF - First Monday JA - FM VL - 27 IS - 7 SE - DO - 10.5210/fm.v27i7.11815 UR - https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/11815 SP - AB - <p>This paper examines what would remain on Facebook if news content was removed, like the company temporarily did in Australia, in February 2021. Using a corpus of 3.3 million Facebook posts published in French in 2020 in four countries (Belgium, Canada, France and Switzerland), it compares media content to non-media content by submitting the text of the posts to three computational analyses: basic n-gram comparison, χ<sup>2</sup> residuals and topic modeling. Two distinct spheres are defined within Facebook content: a “public interest” sphere, made up of media pages, and a “public’s interest” sphere, made up of non-media pages. Religious content and “inspirational” “feel good memes” were found to be most characteristic of a newsless Facebook.</p> ER -