 Algorithmic selection and supply of political news on FacebookInformation Economics and Policy, 2023, vol. 62, issue C Abstract: Facebook has been criticized for exposing its users to low-quality and harmful information, including fake news, hate speech, and politically one-sided content. In December 2013 and again in August 2014, the platform updated its news feed algorithm to increase user exposure to quality content of news publishers, while curbing the proliferation of non-informative posts. This paper uses a sample of German newspapers to investigate the conjecture that these modifications raised the incentives to publish quality news stories on the platform, focusing on the number and diversity of news story posts about substantive political issues. Using the newspapers’ print editions as a counterfactual, our results indicate an increase in the amount of substantive political news on Facebook by approximately 30%. This expansion occurred in a politically balanced way, except that the outlets disproportionately increased their Facebook coverage of the formerly underrepresented Linke (Left Party). Consequently, the within-outlet concentration of political viewpoints decreased by about one half of the standard deviation of our concentration indices. Keywords: Algorithmic curation; Diversity; News quality; Political knowledge; Social media; Voting (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:iepoli:v:62:y:2023:i:c:s0167624523000057 DOI: 10.1016/j.infoecopol.2023.101020 Access Statistics for this article Information Economics and Policy is currently edited by D. Waterman More articles in Information Economics and Policy from Elsevier |
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