Police agencies on Facebook overreport on Black suspects

A large and growing share of the American public turns to Facebook for news. On this platform, reports about crime increasingly come directly from law enforcement agencies, raising questions about content curation. We gathered all posts from almost 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by US law enforcement agencies, focusing on reporting about crime and race. We found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25 percentage points relative to local arrest rates. This overexposure occurs across crime types and geographic regions and increases with the proportion of both Republican voters and non-Black residents. Widespread exposure to overreporting risks reinforcing racial stereotypes about crime and exacerbating punitive preferences among the polity more generally.

As described in Materials and Methods, we downloaded Facebook posts from CrowdTangle at https://crowdtangle.com/ (28). Arrest (30) and NIBRS data (60) were downloaded from Jacob Kaplan’s files on OpenICPSR, available at https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/102263/version/V14/view and https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/118281/version/V5/view (60). All replication data and code can be found in our online replication repository, available through Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NKLYWK (61). Due to restrictions from CrowdTangle, we are unable to provide the raw text, number of interactions, number of shares, or the subscriber count for posts in our data. Users interested in this information may collect it directly from CrowdTangle through the post identifiers we have included in the replication file.