Poll of 2K voters under age 45: 25% read about Facebook Trending controversy, 47% were comfortable with social media sites picking news
Meghan McCarthy / Morning Consult : Tweets: @seanmdav , @mlcalderone , @mathewi and @recode . See also Mediagazer Tweets: Sean Davis / @seanmdav : A new poll shows a 68% drop in GOP perceptions about Facebook after its workers said it suppresses conservative news http://www.recode.net/... Michael Calderone / @mlcalderone : Facebook was main source for how 18-44 yr-olds learned of bias allegations against Facebook: http://morningconsult.com/... http://twitter.com/... Mathew Ingram / @mathewi : “Twenty-six percent think reader interest should be the top driver of news at traditional media outlets” http://morningconsult.com/... @recode : A new poll shows the dramatic drop in Republicans' views of Facebook since bias allegations http://www.recode.net/... http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Nine days after ex-curators described suppressing conservative news inside Facebook's Trending team, Morning Consult polled 2,000 voters under 45 on whether anyone noticed or cared. The answer cuts both ways: only 25% had read about the controversy at all — and Facebook itself was the main channel through which 18-to-44-year-olds who did hear about it learned of the allegations against Facebook.
First-order effects
- GOP perceptions of Facebook fell 68% after the curator allegations, making the party's leadership an immediate political problem for the company in Washington.
- The finding that 47% of under-45 voters are comfortable with social media sites picking news tells Facebook its audience largely accepts delegated curation — the reputational cost is concentrated among Republicans, not the general young electorate.
Second-order effects
- With human editors now politically radioactive, Facebook is pushed toward procedural substitutes for judgment — a path that later shows up in the trust-ranking survey design questions The Atlantic raised about how such rankings treat ideology and contestability.
- Publishers face a double bind: their distribution gatekeeper is also the venue where criticism of that gatekeeper circulates, so coverage of Facebook's bias controversies reaches exactly the audience Facebook controls.
Third-order effects
- If comfort with platform-selected news holds while trust in the mechanism erodes, the durable fix becomes removing visible human discretion altogether — consistent with later reporting on News Feed algorithm tests tweaked to favor right-leaning outlets, which swap curator bias for tuning bias.
- By October 2020, a feed survey found 54% of users saw no news in their first ten posts, suggesting the endgame of this arc is platforms quietly deprioritizing news rather than defending any curation choice.
The trend: Platform news curation is migrating from visible human editors to opaque algorithmic and survey-based mechanisms, because audiences tolerate delegation but not perceived partisanship.